The Elephant in the Room: Rethinking the Usage of Pre-trained Language Model in Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) has seen significant advancements with the help of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Some PLM-based SR models directly use PLM to encode user historical behavior’s text sequences to learn user representations, while there is seldom an in-depth exploration of the capability and suitability of PLM in behavior sequence modeling. In this work, we first conduct extensive model analyses between PLMs and PLM-based SR models, discovering great underutilization and parameter redundancy of PLMs in behavior sequence modeling. Inspired by this, we explore different lightweight usages of PLMs in SR, aiming to maximally stimulate the ability of PLMs for SR while satisfying the efficiency and usability demands of practical systems. We discover that adopting behavior-tuned PLMs for item initializations of conventional ID-based SR models is the most economical framework of PLM-based SR, which would not bring in any additional inference cost but could achieve a dramatic performance boost compared with the original version. Extensive experiments on five datasets show that our simple and universal framework leads to significant improvement compared to classical SR and SOTA PLM-based SR models without additional inference costs. Our code can be found in https://github.com/777pomingzi/Rethinking-PLM-in-RS.