SteerGR: Steering Generative Recommendation via Sparse Autoencoders for Controllable Game Discovery

Sunkyung Lee, Xiaokai Wei, Da Long, Hyunsik Jeon, Jiajun Wu +4

Generative recommendation aims to predict item identifiers from user interaction histories, but explicit control over the properties of recommended items remains underexplored. A key challenge is to connect human-readable concepts to internal features whose interventions effectively change the recommended items. To address this, we propose Steerable Generative Recommender (SteerGR), a framework that uses sparse autoencoders for concept-level control in game discovery. SteerGR proceeds through three stages: (i) Concept Definition and Grounding for defining play concepts with an LLM; (ii) Feature Discovery and Selection for discovering candidate features by their concept associations and selecting one by its steering effect; and (iii) Sparse Feature Intervention for amplifying or suppressing selected features to steer recommendations without retraining the recommender. Extensive experiments with two industrial generative recommendation models on a real-world game dataset show that the selected features successfully steer recommendations toward or away from target concepts. We believe this work takes a first step to extend SAE-based steering from LLMs to industrial generative…