CARD: Non-Uniform Quantization of Visual Semantic Unit for Generative Recommendation
Abstract
Generative recommendation frameworks typically represent items as discrete Semantic IDs (SIDs). While existing studies have sought to enhance SID construction by incorporating multimodal content, collaborative signals, or more advanced quantization techniques, learning high-quality SIDs still faces two key challenges: (1) The two-stage generative recommendation paradigm (SID construction and autoregressive generation) provides insufficient supervision for heterogeneous fusion, which hinders learning high-quality SIDs, and (2) non-uniform embeddings lead to codeword imbalance and generation bias. To address these challenges, we propose a novel generative recommendation framework, called CARD. CARD introduces a visual semantic unit that unifies textual, visual, and collaborative signals into a structured visual representation prior to encoding, enabling holistic semantic modeling and effectively alleviating the semantic gap, thereby reducing the reliance on supervision signals during SID learning. Furthermore, to deal with the highly non-uniform distribution of item semantic embeddings in recommendation scenarios, we develop a non-uniform quantization framework (NU-RQ-VAE), which incorporates a learnable and invertible non-uniform transformation into the quantization process to map skewed semantic distributions into a more balanced latent space, thereby significantly improving codebook utilization and quantization accuracy. Experiments on multiple datasets show that CARD consistently outperforms baseline methods under various settings; meanwhile, the proposed non-uniform transformation module is plug-and-play and remains robust across different quantization schemes. Code is available at https://github.com/HAI-UESTC/CARD.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hao Deng 0011 | 61 | 88 MMQ: Multimodal Mixture-of-Quantization Tokenization for Semantic ID Generation and User Behavioral Adaptation (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 72 HeterRec: Heterogeneous Information Transformer for Scalable Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 69 REG4Rec: Reasoning-Enhanced Generative Model for Large-Scale Recommendation Systems (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 2 | Yongxin Ni | 57 | 62 Frequency-Decoupled Distillation for Efficient Multimodal Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 62 Bridging the Gap: Teacher-Assisted Wasserstein Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Multi-Modal Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 62 Multi-Modality is All You Need for Transferable Recommender Systems (2024) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 3 | Junchen Fu | 53 | 65 Are Multimodal Embeddings Truly Beneficial for Recommendation? A Deep Dive into Whole vs. Individual Modalities (2026) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 62 Frequency-Decoupled Distillation for Efficient Multimodal Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 62 Bridging the Gap: Teacher-Assisted Wasserstein Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Multi-Modal Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 48 |
Area-chair candidates (4)
| Xiaoyi Zeng COI: co-author | 50 | 11 papers | |
| Weiming Liu 0005 assigned | 48 | 8 papers | |
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 43 | 15 papers | |
| Leyu Lin | 42 | 15 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hao Deng 0011 assigned | 61 | 3 | 88 MMQ: Multimodal Mixture-of-Quantization Tokenization for Semantic ID Generation and User Behavioral Adaptation (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 72 HeterRec: Heterogeneous Information Transformer for Scalable Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 2 | Yongxin Ni assigned | 57 | 3 | 62 Frequency-Decoupled Distillation for Efficient Multimodal Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 62 Bridging the Gap: Teacher-Assisted Wasserstein Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Multi-Modal Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 3 | Yupeng Hou | 56 | 3 | 89 Towards Large Generative Recommendation: A Tokenization Perspective (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 78 Generating Long Semantic IDs in Parallel for Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 4 | Jieming Zhu | 55 | 3 | 89 UNGER: Generative Recommendation with A Unified Code via Semantic and Collaborative Integration (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 89 CoST: Contrastive Quantization based Semantic Tokenization for Generative Recommendation (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 5 | Qijiong Liu | 55 | 3 | 89 CoST: Contrastive Quantization based Semantic Tokenization for Generative Recommendation (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 89 Learning Multi-aspect Item Palette: A Semantic Tokenization Framework for Generative Recommendation (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 6 | Junchen Fu assigned | 53 | 3 | 65 Are Multimodal Embeddings Truly Beneficial for Recommendation? A Deep Dive into Whole vs. Individual Modalities (2026) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 62 Frequency-Decoupled Distillation for Efficient Multimodal Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 7 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 51 | 3 | 78 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 74 Bridging Textual-Collaborative Gap through Semantic Codes for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 8 | Jinxin Hu | 50 | 3 | 88 MMQ: Multimodal Mixture-of-Quantization Tokenization for Semantic ID Generation and User Behavioral Adaptation (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 74 HeterRec: Heterogeneous Information Transformer for Scalable Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 10 | Qiang Luo 0004 | 49 | 3 | 74 DiffGRM: Diffusion-based Generative Recommendation Model (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 64 OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 11 | Ed H. Chi | 49 | 3 | 89 Better Generalization with Semantic IDs: A Case Study in Ranking for Recommendations (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 62 Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval (2023) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 12 | Lichan Hong | 49 | 3 | 89 Better Generalization with Semantic IDs: A Case Study in Ranking for Recommendations (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 78 Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval (2023) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 13 | Jiangxia Cao | 48 | 3 | 64 A Multi-modal Modeling Framework for Cold-start Short-video Recommendation (2024) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 62 QARM: Quantitative Alignment Multi-Modal Recommendation at Kuaishou (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 15 | Yu Zhang 0206 | 47 | 3 | 73 MMQ: Multimodal Mixture-of-Quantization Tokenization for Semantic ID Generation and User Behavioral Adaptation (2026) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 65 Distribution-Guided Auto-Encoder for User Multimodal Interest Cross Fusion (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 16 | Lantao Hu | 46 | 3 | 62 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 57 Distinguished Quantized Guidance for Diffusion-based Sequence Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 17 | Junwei Pan | 46 | 3 | 61 Incremental Learning for LLM-based Tokenization and Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 55 Cross-Scale Collaboration between LLMs and Lightweight Sequential Recommenders with Domain-Specific Latent Reasoning (2026) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 18 | Ke Fei | 45 | 3 | 62 Sharpness-Consistent Cross-Domain Recommendation for Cold-Start Items (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 38 Entire-Space Variational Information Exploitation for Post-Click Conversion Rate Prediction (2025) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction |
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| 19 | Han Li 0005 | 45 | 3 | 62 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 48 DualGR: Generative Retrieval with Long and Short-Term Interests Modeling (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 20 | Jie Jiang 0015 | 45 | 3 | 71 Empowering Large Language Model for Sequential Recommendation via Multimodal Embeddings and Semantic IDs (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 61 Incremental Learning for LLM-based Tokenization and Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 21 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 44 | 3 | 51 A Bi-Step Grounding Paradigm for Large Language Models in Recommendation Systems (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 51 Large Language Model Can Interpret Latent Space of Sequential Recommender (2026) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 22 | Ke Wang 0038 | 44 | 3 | 47 LLM-Grounded Diffusion for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 46 Enhancing Cross-Domain Recommendation with Plug-In Contrastive Representations from Large Language Models (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 23 | Jiancan Wu | 44 | 3 | 89 Towards Large Generative Recommendation: A Tokenization Perspective (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 45 Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation (2021) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 24 | Hao Liu 0078 | 43 | 3 | 45 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 45 DA-DAN: A Dual Adversarial Domain Adaption Network for Unsupervised Non-overlapping Cross-domain Recommendation (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 25 | Julian J. McAuley | 43 | 3 | 65 Towards Large Generative Recommendation: A Tokenization Perspective (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 59 Learning Vector-Quantized Item Representation for Transferable Sequential Recommenders (2023) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 27 | Wei Wei 0027 | 43 | 3 | 56 Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 55 PromptMM: Multi-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Recommendation with Prompt-Tuning (2024) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 28 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 43 | 3 | 46 Multifaceted Relation-aware Meta-learning with Dual Customization for User Cold-start Recommendation (2023) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 45 A Preference Learning Decoupling Framework for User Cold-Start Recommendation (2023) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 29 | Yong He 0009 | 43 | 3 | 45 Task Similarity Aware Meta Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation (2022) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation 45 An Industrial Framework for Cold-Start Recommendation in Zero-Shot Scenarios (2022) Content and Attribute-Based Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 30 | Jizhi Zhang | 43 | 3 | 63 Learnable Item Tokenization for Generative Recommendation (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 51 Decoding Matters: Addressing Amplification Bias and Homogeneity Issue in Recommendations for Large Language Models (2024) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 31 | Lianghao Xia | 43 | 3 | 69 RecGPT: A Foundation Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 45 Automated Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 32 | Jinpeng Wang 0002 | 43 | 3 | 62 MISSRec: Pre-training and Transferring Multi-modal Interest-aware Sequence Representation for Recommendation (2023) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 41 ROMA: Recommendation-Oriented Language Model Adaptation Using Multi-Modal Multi-Domain Item Sequences (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 34 | Yongqi Li 0001 | 42 | 3 | 80 Learnable Item Tokenization for Generative Recommendation (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 63 Bridging Items and Language: A Transition Paradigm for Large Language Model-Based Recommendation (2024) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |