LIBER: Lifelong User Behavior Modeling Based on Large Language Models

Abstract

CTR prediction plays a vital role in recommender systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been applied in recommender systems due to their emergence abilities. While leveraging semantic information from LLMs has shown some improvements in the performance of recommender systems, two notable limitations persist in these studies. First, LLM-enhanced recommender systems encounter challenges in extracting valuable information from lifelong user behavior sequences within textual contexts for recommendation tasks. Second, the inherent variability in human behaviors leads to a constant stream of new behaviors and irregularly fluctuating user interests. This characteristic imposes two significant challenges on existing models. On the one hand, it presents difficulties for LLMs in effectively capturing the dynamic shifts in user interests within these sequences, and on the other hand, there exists the issue of substantial computational overhead if the LLMs necessitate recurrent calls upon each update to the user sequences. In this work, we propose Lifelong User Behavior Modeling (LIBER) based on large language models, which includes three modules: (1) User Behavior Streaming Partition (UBSP), (2) User Interest Learning (UIL), and (3) User Interest Fusion (UIF). Initially, UBSP is employed to condense lengthy user behavior sequences into shorter partitions in an incremental paradigm, facilitating more efficient processing. Subsequently, UIL leverages LLMs in a cascading way to infer insights from these partitions. Finally, UIF integrates the textual outputs generated by the aforementioned processes to construct a comprehensive representation, which can be incorporated by any recommendation model to enhance performance. LIBER has been deployed on Huawei's music recommendation service and achieved substantial improvements in users' play count and play time by 3.01% and 7.69%.