HASTE: Hierarchical and Attribute-aware Supervision for Generative Recommendation

Tripti Shukla, Shwetha Somasundaram, Akshat Gupta, Rohit Garg, Paul Duff +1

Generative recommendation models have shown promising results by representing items as semantic IDs and generating these IDs autoregressively. We introduce an approach showing that explicitly incorporating hierarchical and attribute-level supervision into generative recommendation can simultaneously improve training efficiency and long-tail recommendation performance. Existing approaches typically optimize semantic ID prediction with a standard causal cross-entropy objective, which does not explicitly exploit the hierarchical structure of semantic IDs and can require substantial training to learn effective item representations. Moreover, data-sparse tail items often suffer from poor representations due to limited supervision, resulting in weaker long-tail recommendation performance. We address these challenges with HASTE (Hierarchical and Attribute-aware Supervision for generaTive rEcommendation), a unified training framework that introduces hierarchical and attribute-specific supervision. HASTE's Hierarchical Loss explicitly exploits the multi-level structure of semantic IDs, providing supervision at each level of the item hierarchy and substantially accelerating training…