{"paper":{"title":"Are LLM-based Recommenders Already the Best? Simple Scaled Cross-entropy Unleashes the Potential of Traditional Sequential Recommenders","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.IR","authors_text":"Cong Xu, Jianyong Wang, Jun Wang, Mo Yu, Wei Zhang, Zhangchi Zhu","submitted_at":"2024-08-26T12:52:02Z","abstract_excerpt":"Large language models (LLMs) have been garnering increasing attention in the recommendation community. Some studies have observed that LLMs, when fine-tuned by the cross-entropy (CE) loss with a full softmax, could achieve `state-of-the-art' performance in sequential recommendation. However, most of the baselines used for comparison are trained using a pointwise/pairwise loss function. This inconsistent experimental setting leads to the underestimation of traditional methods and further fosters over-confidence in the ranking capability of LLMs.\n  In this study, we provide theoretical justifica"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2408.14238","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2408.14238/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}