GNN-Based Item Indexing for LLM-Enhanced Recommendation
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed recommender systems through strong semantic understanding and generalization. However, the design of item identifiers remains a critical bottleneck that directly affects recommendation quality. Traditional metadata-based identifiers introduce length variability and semantic ambiguity, whereas existing collaborative indexing (CID) approaches often neglect item attributes, show limited cross-dataset generalizability, and incur high computational cost at scale. To address these limitations, we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN)–based item indexing framework with three coordinated innovations. First, we construct attribute-enriched co-occurrence graphs and use a GNN encoder to fuse item features with collaborative signals, yielding semantically informed representations that work well for attribute-rich catalogs. Second, we replace recursive spectral clustering with hierarchical agglomerative clustering on GNN embeddings, enabling direct control of index length via tree depth and reducing hyperparameter tuning across datasets. Third, we exploit localized message passing rather than global eigendecomposition, which provides considerably better runtime efficiency and is amenable to mini-batch training, supporting online index updates as interactions evolve. Across five benchmarks, GID achieves strong average ranking performance, showing larger improvements on sparse and attribute-rich datasets while remaining competitive in dense settings. The framework is robust under both seen and unseen prompt templates, which supports practical LLM-based recommendation. On sequential recommendation, GID improves HR@10 by 7.9% on average over the strongest baseline in each dataset.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Xubin Ren | 53 | 69 How Expressive are Graph Neural Networks in Recommendation? (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 69 Disentangled Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 65 LLMRec: Large Language Models with Graph Augmentation for Recommendation (2024) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion |
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| 2 | Wei Wei 0027 | 53 | 74 LLMRec: Large Language Models with Graph Augmentation for Recommendation (2024) Graph Pretraining and Foundation Models 51 DiffMM: Multi-Modal Diffusion Model for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 50 SSLRec: A Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 3 | Hyunsik Yoo | 49 | 69 Directed Network Embedding with Virtual Negative Edges (2022) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 63 Disentangling Degree-related Biases and Interest for Out-of-Distribution Generalized Directed Network Embedding (2023) Graph Anomaly and Out-of-Distribution Detection 43 Capturing User Interests from Data Streams for Continual Sequential Recommendation (2026) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Qiaoyu Tan | 46 |
Area-chair candidates (3)
| Qiaoyu Tan assigned | 46 | 7 papers | |
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 45 | 8 papers | |
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 43 | 15 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Xubin Ren assigned | 53 | 3 | 69 How Expressive are Graph Neural Networks in Recommendation? (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 69 Disentangled Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 2 | Wei Wei 0027 assigned | 53 | 3 | 74 LLMRec: Large Language Models with Graph Augmentation for Recommendation (2024) Graph Pretraining and Foundation Models 51 DiffMM: Multi-Modal Diffusion Model for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 3 | Mengyuan Jing | 52 | 3 | 69 Learning Shared Representations for Recommendation with Dynamic Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 50 Interest-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation With Diffusion-Based Augmentation (2026) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 4 | Yang Zhang 0072 | 52 | 3 | 59 A Bi-Step Grounding Paradigm for Large Language Models in Recommendation Systems (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 59 Decoding Matters: Addressing Amplification Bias and Homogeneity Issue in Recommendations for Large Language Models (2024) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 5 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 51 | 3 | 59 Adapting Large Language Models by Integrating Collaborative Semantics for Recommendation (2024) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 51 Autonomous Reasoning-Retrieval for Large Language Model Based Recommendation (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 6 | Lianghao Xia | 51 | 3 | 57 RecLM: Recommendation Instruction Tuning (2025) Preference Alignment and Optimization 49 Graph Masked Autoencoder for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 7 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 50 | 3 | 59 Large Language Model Can Interpret Latent Space of Sequential Recommender (2026) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 59 A Bi-Step Grounding Paradigm for Large Language Models in Recommendation Systems (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 8 | Dongxiao He | 50 | 3 | 63 LLM-FSGNN: LLM-Guided Feature-Structure Augmentation Graph Neural Network for Cold-Start Recommendation (2026) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion 63 Feature-Structure Adaptive Completion Graph Neural Network for Cold-start Recommendation (2025) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion |
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| 9 | Bo Chen 0023 | 50 | 3 | 58 Efficient and Deployable Knowledge Infusion for Open-World Recommendations via Large Language Models (2026) Knowledge Infusion and Open-World Augmentation 58 Towards Open-World Recommendation with Knowledge Augmentation from Large Language Models (2024) Knowledge Infusion and Open-World Augmentation |
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| 10 | Yi Zhang 0103 | 50 | 3 | 68 AdaGIN: Adaptive Graph Interaction Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction (2025) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction 66 Revisiting Graph-based Recommender Systems from the Perspective of Variational Auto-Encoder (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning |
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| 11 | Xurong Liang | 50 | 3 | 64 Lightweight Embeddings with Graph Rewiring for Collaborative Filtering (2025) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 64 Lightweight Embeddings for Graph Collaborative Filtering (2024) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning |
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| 12 | Jing Zhu 0005 | 49 | 3 | 69 Node Proximity Is All You Need: Unified Structural and Positional Node and Graph Embedding (2021) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 69 CAPER: Coarsen, Align, Project, Refine - A General Multilevel Framework for Network Alignment (2022) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning |
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| 13 | Hyunsik Yoo assigned | 49 | 3 | 69 Directed Network Embedding with Virtual Negative Edges (2022) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 63 Disentangling Degree-related Biases and Interest for Out-of-Distribution Generalized Directed Network Embedding (2023) Graph Anomaly and Out-of-Distribution Detection |
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| 14 | Jizhi Zhang | 48 | 3 | 59 A Bi-Step Grounding Paradigm for Large Language Models in Recommendation Systems (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 59 Learnable Item Tokenization for Generative Recommendation (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 15 | Ke Wang 0038 | 48 | 3 | 47 Review-Enhanced Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 47 Multi-aspect Graph Contrastive Learning for Review-enhanced Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 16 | Chen Wang 0052 | 48 | 3 | 69 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 48 Multi-task Item-attribute Graph Pre-training for Strict Cold-start Item Recommendation (2023) Graph Pretraining and Foundation Models |
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| 17 | Xiaolong Liu 0012 | 47 | 3 | 69 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 67 DGRec: Graph Neural Network for Recommendation with Diversified Embedding Generation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning |
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| 18 | Jiancan Wu | 47 | 3 | 67 Graph convolution machine for context-aware recommender system (2022) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 47 Large Language Model Can Interpret Latent Space of Sequential Recommender (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 19 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 47 | 3 | 61 Learning Graph-based Disentangled Representations for Next POI Recommendation (2022) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 49 Contrastive Multi-view Interest Learning for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 20 | Huifeng Guo | 47 | 3 | 58 LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 57 SELF: Surrogate-light Feature Selection with Large Language Models in Deep Recommender Systems (2025) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion |
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| 22 | Jieming Zhu | 46 | 3 | 58 Efficient and Deployable Knowledge Infusion for Open-World Recommendations via Large Language Models (2026) Knowledge Infusion and Open-World Augmentation 57 Towards Open-World Recommendation with Knowledge Augmentation from Large Language Models (2024) Knowledge Infusion and Open-World Augmentation |
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| 23 | Yongjing Hao | 46 | 3 | 67 How Do Graph Signals Affect Recommendation: Unveiling the Mystery of Low and High-Frequency Graph Signals (2026) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 48 Learnable Model Augmentation Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 25 | Jurek Leonhardt | 45 | 3 | 69 Node Representation Learning for Directed Graphs (2019) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 41 Data Augmentation for Sample Efficient and Robust Document Ranking (2024) Ranking Distillation and Adaptation |
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| 26 | Lingling Yi | 45 | 3 | 65 PlatoGL: Effective and Scalable Deep Graph Learning System for Graph-enhanced Real-Time Recommendation (2022) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 58 TRAWL: External Knowledge-Enhanced Recommendation with LLM Assistance (2025) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion |
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| 27 | Mingdai Yang | 44 | 3 | 69 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 55 AgentDR: Dynamic Recommendation with Implicit Item-Item Relations via LLM-based Agents (2026) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 28 | Jianling Wang | 44 | 3 | 57 Fresh Content Recommendation at Scale: A Multi-funnel Solution and the Potential of LLMs (2024) Efficiency and Deployment 47 Next-item Recommendation with Sequential Hypergraphs (2020) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 29 | Chongming Gao | 44 | 3 | 57 DLCRec: A Novel Approach for Managing Diversity in LLM-Based Recommender Systems (2025) Preference Alignment and Optimization 57 MGFRec: Towards Reinforced Reasoning Recommendation with Multiple Groundings and Feedback (2026) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 30 | Yupeng Hou | 44 | 3 | 46 Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems (2024) Efficiency and Deployment 46 ActionPiece: Contextually Tokenizing Action Sequences for Generative Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 31 | Wei Guo 0006 | 44 | 3 | 60 Intent-aware Multi-source Contrastive Alignment for Tag-enhanced Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 45 Can LLMs Outshine Conventional Recommenders? A Comparative Evaluation (2025) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 32 | Lantao Hu | 43 | 3 | 51 MODEM: Decoupling User Behavior for Shared-Account Video Recommendations on Large Screen Devices (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 49 Soft Contrastive Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |