LLM-CoT Enhanced Graph Neural Recommendation with Harmonized Group Policy Optimization

Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have advanced recommender systems by modeling interaction relationships. However, existing graph-based recommenders rely on sparse ID features and do not fully exploit textual information, resulting in low information density within representations. Furthermore, graph contrastive learning faces challenges. Random negative sampling can introduce false negative samples, while fixed temperature coefficients cannot adapt to the heterogeneity of different nodes. In addition, current efforts to enhance recommendations with LLMs have not fully utilized their Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities to guide representation learning. To address these limitations, we introduces LGHRec (LLM-CoT Enhanced Graph Neural Recommendation with Harmonized Group Policy Optimization). This framework leverages the CoT reasoning ability of LLMs to generate semantic IDs, enriching reasoning processes and improving information density and semantic quality of representations. Moreover, we design a reinforcement learning algorithm, Harmonized Group Policy Optimization (HGPO), to optimize negative sampling strategies and temperature coefficients in contrastive learning. This approach enhances long-tail recommendation performance and ensures optimization consistency across different groups. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that LGHRec improves representation quality through semantic IDs generated by LLM's CoT reasoning and effectively boosts contrastive learning with HGPO. Our method outperforms several baseline models. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LLM-Rec.