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Cold-Start Recommendation towards the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs): A Comprehensive Survey and Roadmap

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arxiv 2501.01945 v2 pith:7JZA2GFJ submitted 2025-01-03 cs.IR cs.AI

Cold-Start Recommendation towards the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs): A Comprehensive Survey and Roadmap

classification cs.IR cs.AI
keywords cold-startlanguagelargemodelscomprehensiveinformationrecommendationscommunity
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Cold-start problem is one of the long-standing challenges in recommender systems, focusing on accurately modeling new or interaction-limited users or items to provide better recommendations. Due to the diversification of internet platforms and the exponential growth of users and items, the importance of cold-start recommendation (CSR) is becoming increasingly evident. At the same time, large language models (LLMs) have achieved tremendous success and possess strong capabilities in modeling user and item information, providing new potential for cold-start recommendations. However, the research community on CSR still lacks a comprehensive review and reflection in this field. Based on this, in this paper, we stand in the context of the era of large language models and provide a comprehensive review and discussion on the roadmap, related literature, and future directions of CSR. Specifically, we have conducted an exploration of the development path of how existing CSR utilizes information, from content features, graph relations, and domain information, to the world knowledge possessed by large language models, aiming to provide new insights for both the research and industrial communities on CSR. Related resources of cold-start recommendations are collected and continuously updated for the community in https://github.com/YuanchenBei/Awesome-Cold-Start-Recommendation.

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Cited by 12 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. From Raw IDs to Semantic Planning: How Recommender Systems Utilize Information at Scale

    cs.IR 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    Recommender systems are moving from raw IDs to semantic IDs, and the authors argue the next stage is 'semantic planning'—predicting an exposure's goal before choosing the item.

  2. Sparse Contrastive Learning for Content-Based Cold Item Recommendation

    cs.IR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SEMCo uses sparse entmax contrastive learning for purely content-based cold-start item recommendation, outperforming standard methods in ranking accuracy.

  3. Learning Sparse Representations of Multimodal Content for Enhanced Cold Item Recommendation

    cs.IR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Sparse content embeddings with a pre-sparsification alpha-entmax activation outperform dense embeddings for cold-start item recommendation at lower storage cost, especially for users with multiple interests.

  4. Leveraging Artist Catalogs for Cold-Start Music Recommendation

    cs.IR 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    ACARec attends over artist catalogs to generate CF embeddings for new tracks, more than doubling recall and NDCG versus content-only baselines in music recommendation.

  5. Mixture of Sequence: Theme-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Long-Sequence Recommendation

    cs.IR 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MoS applies theme-aware routing to extract multi-scale theme-specific subsequences from noisy long user sequences, achieving state-of-the-art recommendation performance with fewer FLOPs than comparable MoE models.

  6. NaviAgent: Bilevel Planning on Tool Navigation Graph for Large-Scale Orchestration

    cs.AI 2025-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    NaviAgent decouples task planning from tool execution via a Tool World Navigation Model graph to improve scalability and success rates in LLM agents handling large tool ecosystems.

  7. From Raw IDs to Semantic Planning: How Recommender Systems Utilize Information at Scale

    cs.IR 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Recommender systems are moving from raw IDs to semantic IDs, and the next step should be semantic planning that first predicts an exposure's purpose before choosing or generating content.

  8. Towards Sustainable Growth: A Multi-Value-Aware Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Search

    cs.IR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    GrowthGR combines ItemLTV counterfactual prediction with MultiGR generative retrieval and MoPO optimization to deliver 5.3% new item GMV lift and 0.3% overall GMV gain on Taobao production.

  9. Uncertainty-Calibrated Recommendations for Low-Active Users

    cs.IR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A unified uncertainty-calibrated framework applies differentiated deboosting and UCB strategies by user activity level, yielding retention gains for low-active users and diversity gains for high-active users on a live...

  10. From Raw IDs to Semantic Planning: How Recommender Systems Utilize Information at Scale

    cs.IR 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Industrial recommenders are evolving from raw IDs through semantic IDs toward semantic planning, where the system predicts a semantic next-exposure target before choosing or generating a concrete item.

  11. Uncertainty-Calibrated Recommendations for Low-Active Users

    cs.IR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    Presents an uncertainty-calibrated framework applying risk-averse deboosting to low-active users and UCB exploration to high-active users, with reported gains in retention and diversity on a livestream platform.

  12. Toward User Preference Alignment in LLM Recommendation via Explicit Context Feedback

    cs.IR 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    Advocates prioritizing explicit contextual feedback in LLM-based recommender systems to improve user preference alignment and explainability.