RecSoup: Efficient Model Merging Approach for Controllable Multi-Objective Recommendation

Zidong Jia, Guofu Xie, Xiao Zhang

Recommender systems often need to balance multiple conflicting objectives. Controllable Multi-Objective Recommendation (CMOR) enables dynamic adjustment of objective trade-offs at inference time without retraining, adapting to shifting user or system requirements. Existing CMOR approaches typically rely on output-level reranking or parameter-generating modules, which either limit the scope of feasible trade-offs or incur substantial training and inference cost. Model merging provides a promising alternative by reusing multiple objective-specific models via parameter combination. However, its direct application to recommender systems is challenging due to the lack of a shared linear regime and cross-objective interference. To address these issues, we propose RecSoup, a lightweight two-stage approach for effective CMOR via specialized model merging. RecSoup first mitigates parameter interference across objectives through a pruning strategy that jointly considers objective-specific importance and cross-objective relevance. It then performs adaptive parameter merging via a learnable preference-to-coefficient mapping, allowing dynamic trade-off control at inference time without joint…