Tutorial on Recommendation with Generative Models (Gen-RecSys)

This intermediate-level tutorial, titled "Gen-RecSys", merges both industrial and academic perspectives on recent advances in Generative AI for recommender systems (beyond LLMs). It aims to highlight the transformative role of generative models in modern recommender systems, which have significantly impacted the AI field-particularly with the rise of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT-and have contributed to a rapid convergence of the fields of search, data mining, and recommendation. By providing attendees with a modern perspective on GenAI applications in recommendation, the tutorial will emphasize how generative models can drive recommendation by unlocking and interacting with rich data representations, including behavioral, textual, and multi-modal data-knowledge highly transferable across many applications of interest to the WSDM community. Participants will learn about the categorization of generative models in recommender systems based on underlying data modalities: (i) ID-based collaborative models, (ii) text-driven models such as LLMs, and (iii) multi-modal models. Within each category, various deep generative model paradigms (e.g., AR, GAN, diffusion models) will be introduced, along with insights into their application areas. The tutorial will also cover evaluation aspects, including benchmarks, metrics, and assessments of social and ethical impacts and harms. This tutorial presents a condensed version of the industrial and academic work featured in the forthcoming book at FntIR 2024-25, titled "Recommendation with Generative Models [7]," and a shorter version prepared, and presented by the team, see GenRecSys-Survey [6].