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GFlowGR: Fine-tuning Generative Recommendation Frameworks with Generative Flow Networks

sigir26-139 · Full research paper · Yejing Wang, Shengyu Zhou, Jinyu Lu, Qidong Liu, Xinhang Li, Wenlin Zhang, Feng Li, Pengjie Wang, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao
Generative Retrieval and Ranking · 50% Offline RL for Recommendation · 25% Generative Retrieval and Recommendat · 25%
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

#ReviewerMatchWhy (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
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 chairMatch
Leyu Lin 49
Area-chair candidates (5)
Leyu Lin assigned 4915 papers
Xiaoyi Zeng COI: co-author 4811 papers
Kun Gai COI: co-author 485 papers
Maolin Wang 0001 COI: co-author 4815 papers
Xin Xin 0003 COI: co-author 4510 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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