Listwise Preference Alignment Optimization for Tail Item Recommendation

Abstract: Preference alignment has achieved greater success on LLMs and drawn broad interest in recommendation research. Existing preference alignment methods for recommendation either require explicit reward modeling or only support pairwise preference comparison. The former directly increases substantial computational costs, while the latter hinders training efficiency on negative samples. Moreover, no existing effort has explored preference alignment solutions for tail-item recommendation. To bridge the above gaps, we propose LPO4Rec, which extends the Bradley-Terry model from pairwise comparison to listwise comparison, to improve the efficiency of model training. Specifically, we derive a closed form optimal policy to enable more efficient and effective training without explicit reward modeling. We also present an adaptive negative sampling and reweighting strategy to prioritize tail items during optimization and enhance performance in tail-item recommendations. Besides, we theoretically prove that optimizing the listwise preference optimization (LPO) loss is equivalent to maximizing the upper bound of the optimal reward. Our experiments on three public datasets show that our method outperforms 10 baselines by a large margin, achieving up to 50% performance improvement while reducing 17.9% GPU memory usage when compared with direct preference optimization (DPO) in tail-item recommendation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yuhanleeee/LPO4Rec.