MoMoREC: A Multi-agent Motivation Generation Framework for Residual Semantic ID-Aware Recommendation

Recent advances in the field of sequential recommendation have highlighted the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in enhancing item embeddings and improving user understanding. However, existing approaches face three major limitations: 1) insufficient understanding of the reasons behind users' purchase decisions, 2) the high-dimensional embeddings directly produced by LLMs are not well compatible with traditional low-dimensional ID embeddings and 3) reliance on additional fine-tuning and high inference overhead to adapt LLMs to the recommendation task. In this paper, we propose MoMoREC, a simple yet effective user-understanding-based recommendation strategy. This method leverages the intrinsic comprehension capabilities of LLMs combined with residual semantic IDs to better understand users. Specifically, starting from common user purchasing behaviors and incorporating item characteristics, we employ a multi-agent framework to utilize LLMs in analyzing user shopping motivations and extracting high-dimensional dense embeddings. These embeddings are then transformed into low-dimensional IDs using a residual semantic ID approach via clustering and residual dimensionality reduction, which can be fed into the recommendation model. MoMoREC effectively integrates the understanding power of LLMs with the strengths of recommendation systems, preserving rich semantic language embeddings while reducing or eliminating the need for auxiliary trainable modules. As a result, it seamlessly adapts to any sequential recommendation framework. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that MoMoRec significantly improves traditional recommendation models, demonstrating its effectiveness and flexibility.