This is a corrigendum for the article “One Model for All: Large Language Models are Domain-Agnostic Recommendation Systems” published in ACM Trans. Inf. Syst . 43, 5, Article 118 (July 2025), 27 pages.

The data sparsity problem has been a long-standing obstacle towards achieving better recommendation performance since it is miserable to estimate the user’s interests from limited historical behaviors. The pre-training paradigm, i.e., learning universal knowledge across a wide spectrum of domains, has increasingly become a new de-facto practice in many fields, especially for adaption to new domains. The merit of this superior generalizability renders it a natural choice to tackle the data sparsity problem for various recommendation scenarios. Hence, several efforts mainly follow masked language modeling or simple data augmentation via contrastive learning to build a pre-trained recommendation model. Our recent work (namely Miracle ) suggests that the common treatment utilizing the masked language modeling is not sufficient for pre-training a recommender system, since a user’s intent could be more complex than predicting the next word or item. The encouraging results demonstrate that the multi-interest modeling could significantly push the frontier of recommender system pre-training. Nevertheless, how to accommodate the temporal dynamics of the user interests seems to be underexplored under both single vector representation and multi-interest schemes. In this article, we aim to incorporate sophisticated temporal information modeling with the current advance in this line. More specifically, we extend Miracle by further considering relative position information and two kinds of relative time interval information jointly when performing multi-interest learning. Then, a sequential process for interest refinement is proposed to learn the subtle nuances of how interests change and shift along the timeline, leading to a more precise representation of user interests. Our extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution, demonstrating a significant improvement over current state-of-the-art models on these benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/WHUIR/Horae .

Sequential recommendation systems aim to predict users’ next likely interaction based on their history. However, these systems face data sparsity and cold-start problems. Utilizing data from other domains, known as multi-domain methods, is useful for alleviating these problems. However, traditional multi-domain methods rely on meaningless ID-based item representation, which makes it difficult to align items with similar meanings from different domains, yielding sup-optimal knowledge transfer. This article introduces LLM-Rec , a framework that utilizes pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for domain-agnostic recommendation. Specifically, we mix user’s behaviors from multiple domains and concatenate item titles into a sentence, then use LLMs for generating user and item representations. By mixing behaviors across different domains, we can exploit the knowledge encoded in LLMs to bridge the semantic across over multi-domain behaviors, thus obtaining semantically rich representations and improving performance in all domains. Furthermore, we explore the underlying reasons why LLMs are effective and investigate whether LLMs can understand the semantic correlations as the recommendation model, and if advanced techniques like scaling laws in NLP also work in recommendations. We conduct extensive experiments with LLMs ranging from 40 M to 6.7 B to answer the above questions and to verify the effectiveness of LLM-Rec in multi-domain recommendation. The source code is available at https://github.com/WHUIR/LLMRec .

Recent works demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-modal information for sequential recommendation. However, the computational cost and representation degeneration fail to be focused specifically and addressed adequately in multi-modality recommendation. To this end, we first identify and formalize three properties i.e., diversity, compactness, and consistency from the geometric space and spectrum perspective. Building upon this foundation, we devise tailored loss functions to regularize the above three properties for representation optimization. Theoretical underpinnings and experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of an enhanced item representation in ameliorating degeneration. Furthermore, we propose an efficient and expandable image-centered method, named E2 ImgRec, to mitigate the immense cost of computation. Concretely, we substitute the linear projection operations in the self-attention module and feed-forward network layer with two learnable rescaling vectors or efficient recommendation, then leverage cross-attention for multi-modality information fusion. Extensive experiments on three public datasets illustrate our method outperforms representative ID-based solutions and multi-modal based state-of-the-arts with only up to 39.9% in memory usage and 4.3× acceleration in training time. The code for replication is available at https://github.com/WHUIR/E2ImgRec.

Recently, the item textual information has been exploited with pre-trained language models (PLMs) to enrich the representations of tail items. The underlying idea is to align the hot items and tail items in terms of the external semantic knowledge covered by the PLM. However, it is non-trivial to eliminate the popularity bias by exploiting the textual semantics. One major obstacle is that the model supervision still counts on the sparse yet binary user behaviors. In the preliminary investigation, we discover that text-based recommendations also suffer from the popularity bias.

The pre-training paradigm, i.e., learning universal knowledge across a wide spectrum of domains, has increasingly become a new de-facto practice in many fields, especially for transferring to new domains. The recent progress includes universal pre-training solutions for recommendation. However, we argue that the common treatment utilizing the masked language modeling or simple data augmentation via contrastive learning is not sufficient for pre-training a recommender system, since a user's intent could be more complex than predicting the next word or item. It is more intuitive to go a step further by devising the multi-interest driven pre-training framework for universal user understanding. Nevertheless, incorporating multi-interest modeling in recommender system pre-training is non-trivial due to the dynamic, contextual, and temporary nature of the user interests, particularly when the users are from different domains. The limited effort on this line has greatly rendered it as an open question.