GFlowGR: Fine-tuning Generative Recommendation Frameworks with Generative Flow Networks
Abstract
Generative recommendation (GR) has shown great promise in industrial applications, particularly for candidate generation and end-to-end recommendations. However, existing GR training paradigms suffer from two fundamental mismatches with real-world deployment requirements. First, they optimize for point-wise prediction of a single ground-truth item, whereas practical systems must produce a diverse, high-value set of candidates. Second, they treat all user interactions as equally informative, ignoring their inherent differences in utility. Although reward-based fine-tuning offers a partial remedy, it often lacks token-level supervision. To address these challenges, we reformulate GR as a sequential set-generation problem and propose GFlowGR, a GFlowNet-based fine-tuning framework that explicitly aligns generation probabilities with item-level utilities. GFlowGR comprises three tightly integrated components, each addressing a key limitation of conventional fine-tuning: a trajectory sampler that constructs training trajectories from candidate sets to enable set-wise learning, a behavior-aware reward model that quantifies item utility to support value-aware optimization, and a GFlowNet objective that provides token-level supervision. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets with two representative LLM-based GR backbones show consistent and significant improvements over strong baselines, validating the effectiveness of our approach. For real-world deployment, GFlowGR has been integrated into Taobao 's search advertising businesses, delivering a 0.4% relative improvement in annual revenue since its launch in mid-2025, corresponding to billion-level monetary gains. Code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/SIGIR26_GFlowGR.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qiang Luo 0004 | 51 | 77 OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 61 DiffGRM: Diffusion-based Generative Recommendation Model (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 49 GRank: Towards Target-Aware and Streamlined Industrial Retrieval with a Generate-Rank Framework (2026) Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search |
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| 2 | Lichan Hong | 48 | 72 Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval (2023) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 63 PLUM: Adapting Pre-trained Language Models for Industrial-scale Generative Recommendations (2026) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 50 Better Generalization with Semantic IDs: A Case Study in Ranking for Recommendations (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Leyu Lin | 49 |
Area-chair candidates (5)
| Leyu Lin assigned | 49 | 15 papers | |
| Xiaoyi Zeng COI: co-author | 48 | 11 papers | |
| Kun Gai COI: co-author | 48 | 5 papers | |
| Maolin Wang 0001 COI: co-author | 48 | 15 papers | |
| Xin Xin 0003 COI: co-author | 45 | 10 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Han Li 0005 COI: co-author | 56 | 3 | 74 DualGR: Generative Retrieval with Long and Short-Term Interests Modeling (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 74 Making Transformer Decoders Better Differentiable Indexers (2025) Generative Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 2 | Hao Deng 0011 | 56 | 3 | 85 RCLRec: Reverse Curriculum Learning for Modeling Sparse Conversions in Generative Recommendation (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 71 REG4Rec: Reasoning-Enhanced Generative Model for Large-Scale Recommendation Systems (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 3 | Xuanhua Yang COI: co-author | 56 | 3 | 83 GenRec: A Preference-Oriented Generative Framework for Large-Scale Recommendation (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 64 Towards Personalized Bundle Creative Generation with Contrastive Non-Autoregressive Decoding (2022) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 4 | Shuchang Liu 0001 COI: co-author | 55 | 3 | 64 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 60 Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 5 | Lantao Hu COI: co-author | 52 | 3 | 72 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 53 Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks (2024) Offline RL for Recommendation |
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| 6 | Qijiong Liu | 51 | 3 | 85 Full Retraining, Incremental Fine-tuning, and Hybrid Serving: Model Updating and Serving for Industrial Generative Recommender Systems (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 61 RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation (2025) Generative Retrieval and Recommendation Architectures |
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| 7 | Qiang Luo 0004 assigned | 51 | 3 | 77 OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 61 DiffGRM: Diffusion-based Generative Recommendation Model (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 8 | Yupeng Hou | 51 | 3 | 74 Multi-Behavior Generative Recommendation (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 73 Inductive Generative Recommendation via Retrieval-based Speculation (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 9 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 50 | 3 | 72 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 51 Bridging Textual-Collaborative Gap through Semantic Codes for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 10 | Ed H. Chi | 49 | 3 | 72 Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval (2023) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 64 PLUM: Adapting Pre-trained Language Models for Industrial-scale Generative Recommendations (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 12 | Jieming Zhu | 49 | 3 | 77 EAGER: Two-Stream Generative Recommender with Behavior-Semantic Collaboration (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 54 EAGER-LLM: Enhancing Large Language Models as Recommenders through Exogenous Behavior-Semantic Integration (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 13 | Yongxin Ni | 49 | 3 | 53 Where to Go Next for Recommender Systems? ID- vs. Modality-based Recommender Models Revisited (2023) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 53 Efficient and Effective Adaptation of Multimodal Foundation Models in Sequential Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 14 | Jinxin Hu | 48 | 3 | 85 RCLRec: Reverse Curriculum Learning for Modeling Sparse Conversions in Generative Recommendation (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 70 REG4Rec: Reasoning-Enhanced Generative Model for Large-Scale Recommendation Systems (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 15 | Lichan Hong assigned | 48 | 3 | 72 Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval (2023) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 63 PLUM: Adapting Pre-trained Language Models for Industrial-scale Generative Recommendations (2026) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 16 | Wei Guo 0006 | 48 | 3 | 86 Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Unifying Retrieval and Ranking with a Single Generative Recommendation Model (2025) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 85 Full Retraining, Incremental Fine-tuning, and Hybrid Serving: Model Updating and Serving for Industrial Generative Recommender Systems (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 19 | Bo Chen 0023 COI: co-author | 48 | 3 | 85 Generative Representational Learning of Foundation Models for Recommendation (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 48 Large language models make sample-efficient recommender systems (2025) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 21 | Yongqi Li 0001 | 48 | 3 | 73 EARN: Efficient Inference Acceleration for LLM-based Generative Recommendation by Register Tokens (2025) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 73 Efficient Inference for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation (2025) Generative Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 22 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 47 | 3 | 52 A Bi-Step Grounding Paradigm for Large Language Models in Recommendation Systems (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 48 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 23 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 46 | 3 | 59 GenSAR: Unifying Balanced Search and Recommendation with Generative Retrieval (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 49 When Search Meets Recommendation: Learning Disentangled Search Representation for Recommendation (2023) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 24 | Yu Zhang 0206 | 46 | 3 | 85 RCLRec: Reverse Curriculum Learning for Modeling Sparse Conversions in Generative Recommendation (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 52 MMQ: Multimodal Mixture-of-Quantization Tokenization for Semantic ID Generation and User Behavioral Adaptation (2026) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 25 | Yang Song 0008 | 46 | 3 | 59 GenSAR: Unifying Balanced Search and Recommendation with Generative Retrieval (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 47 Making Transformer Decoders Better Differentiable Indexers (2025) Generative Retrieval |
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| 26 | Junjie Zhang 0009 | 45 | 3 | 74 Generative Next-Basket Recommendation (2023) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 47 Tapping the Potential of Large Language Models as Recommender Systems: A Comprehensive Framework and Empirical Analysis (2025) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 27 | Hao Liu 0078 | 45 | 3 | 49 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 47 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 29 | Chongming Gao | 45 | 3 | 55 Alleviating Matthew Effect of Offline Reinforcement Learning in Interactive Recommendation (2023) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation 49 MGFRec: Towards Reinforced Reasoning Recommendation with Multiple Groundings and Feedback (2026) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 30 | Junchen Fu | 45 | 3 | 53 IISAN: Efficiently Adapting Multimodal Representation for Sequential Recommendation with Decoupled PEFT (2024) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 53 Efficient and Effective Adaptation of Multimodal Foundation Models in Sequential Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 31 | Huifeng Guo COI: co-author | 45 | 3 | 86 Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Unifying Retrieval and Ranking with a Single Generative Recommendation Model (2025) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 51 LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 32 | Fei Sun 0001 COI: co-author | 45 | 3 | 56 Exact-K Recommendation via Maximal Clique Optimization (2019) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 54 Unified Conversational Recommendation Policy Learning via Graph-based Reinforcement Learning (2021) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
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| 33 | Ziru Liu COI: co-author | 44 | 3 | 55 Multi-Task Recommendations with Reinforcement Learning (2023) Offline RL for Recommendation 55 Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks (2024) Multi-Behavior Recommendation |
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| 34 | Jianling Wang | 44 | 3 | 49 A Hierarchical Self-Attentive Model for Recommending User-Generated Item Lists (2019) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 48 Learning to Augment for Casual User Recommendation (2022) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 35 | Jiangxia Cao | 44 | 3 | 52 A Multi-modal Modeling Framework for Cold-start Short-video Recommendation (2024) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 48 From Agnostic to Specific: Latent Preference Diffusion for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |