Bridging LLM Embeddings and VAE Parameters for Disentangled Recommendation
Abstract
Disentangled recommendation within the Variational Autoencoder (VAE) framework aims to capture multiple user interests. While effective, these VAEs are fundamentally constrained by their reliance on interaction data alone, lacking the rich external semantic knowledge needed to properly structure and separate latent interests. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at deriving profound user preference signals from textual data. Prevailing methods for integrating LLMs into recommendation, however, either focus on single-interest modeling or perform a shallow fusion by aligning LLM and VAE representation spaces. Thus, they fail to fundamentally shape the VAE's latent space for multi-interest learning, hindering recommendation performance. To bridge this gap, we propose to fundamentally shift the integration point: instead of aligning representation spaces, we bridge the LLM-generated embedding space directly to the VAE's parameter space. Our framework designs hypernetworks to generate parameters governing interest discovery of a disentangled VAE conditioned on LLM-derived user embeddings. This direct bridge injects rich semantic knowledge into the model's learning foundation, preserving the VAE's power for disentangled representation while dramatically enhancing its modeling capability with informative, LLM-structured priors. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method yields significant performance gains, unveiling the untapped potential of using LLMs for disentangled recommendation.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yang Zhang 0072 | 59 | 60 Don't Start Over: A Cost-Effective Framework for Migrating Personalized Prompts Between LLMs (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 57 LLM Personalization: Foundations, Breakthroughs, and Frontiers (2026) User Profile and Persona Modeling 54 CoLLM: Integrating Collaborative Embeddings Into Large Language Models for Recommendation (2025) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment |
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| 2 | Dan Luo 0004 | 43 | 68 Flow Matching Based Sequential Recommender Model (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 42 Scaling Collaborative Filtering with Multimodal Contrastive Fine-tuning (2026) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 40 Unbiased Learning-to-Rank Needs Unconfounded Propensity Estimation (2024) Unbiased Learning to Rank |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 52 |
Area-chair candidates (4)
| Maolin Wang 0001 assigned | 52 | 15 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 45 | 10 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 44 | 5 papers | |
| Leyu Lin | 43 | 15 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 63 | 3 | 68 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 68 On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 2 | Yang Zhang 0072 assigned | 59 | 3 | 60 Don't Start Over: A Cost-Effective Framework for Migrating Personalized Prompts Between LLMs (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 57 LLM Personalization: Foundations, Breakthroughs, and Frontiers (2026) User Profile and Persona Modeling |
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| 3 | Jizhi Zhang | 53 | 3 | 62 A Bi-Step Grounding Paradigm for Large Language Models in Recommendation Systems (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 61 Large Language Model Can Interpret Latent Space of Sequential Recommender (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 5 | Yupeng Hou | 52 | 3 | 56 Adapting Large Language Models by Integrating Collaborative Semantics for Recommendation (2024) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment 53 Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach (2025) Personalized LLM Adaptation |
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| 6 | Chongming Gao | 50 | 3 | 60 Don't Start Over: A Cost-Effective Framework for Migrating Personalized Prompts Between LLMs (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 59 Reinforced Prompt Personalization for Recommendation with Large Language Models (2025) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 7 | Jiancan Wu | 49 | 3 | 66 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 63 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 8 | Han Li 0005 | 49 | 3 | 69 DiffusionGS: Generative Search with Query Conditioned Diffusion in Kuaishou (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 60 LEARN: Knowledge Adaptation from Large Language Model to Recommendation for Practical Industrial Application (2025) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 9 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 49 | 3 | 62 Adapting Large Language Models by Integrating Collaborative Semantics for Recommendation (2024) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 46 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 10 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 49 | 3 | 68 Disentangled Contrastive Bundle Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 39 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 11 | Lantao Hu | 48 | 3 | 70 Distinguished Quantized Guidance for Diffusion-based Sequence Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 68 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 12 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 48 | 3 | 69 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 67 Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 13 | Jieming Zhu | 47 | 3 | 59 ROMA: Recommendation-Oriented Language Model Adaptation Using Multi-Modal Multi-Domain Item Sequences (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 58 EAGER-LLM: Enhancing Large Language Models as Recommenders through Exogenous Behavior-Semantic Integration (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 14 | Junjie Zhang 0009 | 47 | 3 | 53 Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach (2025) Personalized LLM Adaptation 48 Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems (2024) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 15 | Lianghao Xia | 46 | 3 | 65 DiffKG: Knowledge Graph Diffusion Model for Recommendation (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion 54 Representation Learning with Large Language Models for Recommendation (2024) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment |
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| 16 | Bo Chen 0023 | 46 | 3 | 61 ELCoRec: Enhance Language Understanding with Co-Propagation of Numerical and Categorical Features for Recommendation (2024) LLM-Collaborative Filtering Integration 50 Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 17 | Ching Law | 46 | 3 | 68 Uni-Layout: Integrating Human Feedback in Unified Layout Generation and Evaluation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 68 MoFu: Scale-Aware Modulation and Fourier Fusion for Multi-Subject Video Generation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 18 | Xuanhua Yang | 45 | 3 | 69 Towards Personalized Bundle Creative Generation with Contrastive Non-Autoregressive Decoding (2022) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 47 GenRec: A Preference-Oriented Generative Framework for Large-Scale Recommendation (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 20 | Jiangxia Cao | 45 | 3 | 67 From Agnostic to Specific: Latent Preference Diffusion for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 57 Enhancing Content-based Recommendation via Large Language Model (2024) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment |
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| 21 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 45 | 3 | 56 LLM-Enhanced Linear Autoencoders for Recommendation (2025) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment 43 Temporal Linear Item-Item Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 22 | Yang Song 0008 | 45 | 3 | 58 Large Language Models Enhanced Collaborative Filtering (2024) LLM-Enhanced Collaborative Filtering 55 Retrieval Augmented Generation with Collaborative Filtering for Personalized Text Generation (2025) Personalized and Conversational RAG |
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| 23 | Shijie Wang 0002 | 44 | 3 | 68 Continuous-time Discrete-space Diffusion Model for Recommendation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 61 Score-Based Generative Diffusion Models for Social Recommendations (2025) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 25 | Junwei Pan | 44 | 3 | 61 Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle: Empowering Sequential Recommendation with Large Language Models (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 49 Incremental Learning for LLM-based Tokenization and Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 26 | Qiang Luo 0004 | 44 | 3 | 58 DiffGRM: Diffusion-based Generative Recommendation Model (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 45 OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 27 | Huifeng Guo | 44 | 3 | 59 Prompt Tuning as User Inherent Profile Inference Machine (2025) Efficiency and Deployment 49 LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 28 | Keqin Bao | 44 | 3 | 57 CoLLM: Integrating Collaborative Embeddings Into Large Language Models for Recommendation (2025) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment 54 Text-like Encoding of Collaborative Information in Large Language Models for Recommendation (2024) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment |
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| 29 | Hao Liu 0078 | 44 | 3 | 47 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 41 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 30 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 44 | 3 | 55 Retrieval Augmented Generation with Collaborative Filtering for Personalized Text Generation (2025) Personalized and Conversational RAG 48 Benefit from Rich: Tackling Search Interaction Sparsity in Search Enhanced Recommendation (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 31 | Mengyuan Jing | 44 | 3 | 69 Generating Difficulty-aware Negative Samples via Conditional Diffusion for Multi-modal Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 67 Interest-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation With Diffusion-Based Augmentation (2026) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 32 | Chen Wang 0052 | 43 | 3 | 58 Collaborative Alignment for Recommendation (2024) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment 42 Cluster-Aware Item Prompt Learning for Session-Based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Enhanced Sequential Recommendation |
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| 33 | Xubin Ren | 43 | 3 | 69 Multi-auxiliary Augmented Collaborative Variational Auto-encoder for Tag Recommendation (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 54 EasyRec: Simple yet Effective Language Models for Recommendation (2025) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment |