Understanding Semantic IDs: From Item Representation to Item Selection in Generative Recommendation
Semantic IDs (SIDs) are now a central component of generative recommendation. Current SID-based systems assign three roles to the same token sequence. Shared prefixes are intended to organize related items, the complete SID identifies an individual item, and each generated token narrows the items that can still be returned. We systematically investigate SIDs from item encoding and SID construction to autoregressive generation and final recommendation. We examine how SID construction changes item representations and how those changes affect generation. Across three Amazon domains and eight SID constructions, SID neighborhoods recover only 32.2% of the encoder's ten nearest neighbors on ave...
| Authors | Junting Wang, Xinrui He, Yunzhe Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 27 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 July 2026 |
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