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Abstract - LBR: Towards Mitigating Length Bias in Large Language Models for Recommendation
Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful backbones for recommender systems by reformulating recommendation as a token-level generation task. Despite their promise, we identify a pervasive yet underexplored issue: $\textit{Length Bias}$. Because items are represented by textual descriptions of varying lengths, LLM-based recommenders can be systematically biased in two ways. On the input side, longer item descriptions occupy more tokens in the context and thus receive disproportionately large aggregate attention mass during user preference modeling. On the output side, decoding based on summed autoregressive log-likelihood score inherently disfavors long items. Worse still, conventional length normalization can introduce an additional bias and even degrade recommendation performance. To address this problem, we propose $\textbf{LBR}$ ($\textbf{L}$ength $\textbf{B}$ias $\textbf{R}$eduction), a lightweight and model-agnostic framework for mitigating length bias in LLM-based recommendation. LBR mitigates input-side bias via Length-Aware Attention Calibration, which incorporates a length-dependent offset into attention logits to neutralize attention skew. For the output side, LBR introduces Effective Information Length Normalization, replacing naive token count with an information-theoretic length surrogate derived from the branching structure of the prefix tree. Extensive experiments on three real-world Amazon datasets and two representative LLM-based recommenders demonstrate that LBR substantially alleviates length bias while consistently improving recommendation accuracy and fairness, with negligible additional training and inference overhead (with an average NDCG@5 gain of 16.82%). The code is available at this https URL.
LBR:缓解大语言模型推荐中的长度偏差 /
LBR: Towards Mitigating Length Bias in Large Language Models for Recommendation
1️⃣ 一句话总结
本文发现大语言模型在用于推荐系统时,会因商品文本描述长度不同而产生偏好偏差(较长文本获得更多注意力,较短文本在生成评分时被低估),并提出了一个轻量、通用的框架LBR,通过校准注意力权重和改用基于信息论的长度归一化方法,在几乎不增加计算成本的情况下同时提升了推荐的准确性和公平性。