SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2409.12150

Decoding Style: Efficient Fine-Tuning of LLMs for Image-Guided Outfit Recommendation with Preference

Abstract

Personalized outfit recommendation remains a complex challenge, demanding both fashion compatibility understanding and trend awareness. This paper presents a novel framework that harnesses the expressive power of large language models (LLMs) for this task, mitigating their "black box" and static nature through fine-tuning and direct feedback integration. We bridge the item visual-textual gap in items descriptions by employing image captioning with a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). This enables the LLM to extract style and color characteristics from human-curated fashion images, forming the basis for personalized recommendations. The LLM is efficiently fine-tuned on the open-source Polyvore dataset of curated fashion images, optimizing its ability to recommend stylish outfits. A direct preference mechanism using negative examples is employed to enhance the LLM's decision-making process. This creates a self-enhancing AI feedback loop that continuously refines recommendations in line with seasonal fashion trends. Our framework is evaluated on the Polyvore dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in two key tasks: fill-in-the-blank, and complementary item retrieval. These evaluations underline the framework's ability to generate stylish, trend-aligned outfit suggestions, continuously improving through direct feedback. The evaluation results demonstrated that our proposed framework significantly outperforms the base LLM, creating more cohesive outfits. The improved performance in these tasks underscores the proposed framework's potential to enhance the shopping experience with accurate suggestions, proving its effectiveness over the vanilla LLM based outfit generation.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Najmeh Forouzandehmehr, Nima Farrokhsiar, Ramin Giahi, Evren Korpeoglu, Kannan Achan. 2024-09-18. Decoding Style: Efficient Fine-Tuning of LLMs for Image-Guided Outfit Recommendation with Preference. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12150

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

UniRec: Cross-stage Multi-Task Fusion with Preference Alignment for Cascaded Recommender Systems

Industrial recommender systems use cascaded stages with different objectives, feature spaces, and latency constraints. Optimizing pre-ranking and ranking separately can create cross-stage inconsistency: upstream models may filter out items preferred by downstream rankers, and independently tuned downstream fusion can offset upstream improvements. Existing multi-task fusion methods focus on multi-objective fusion within the ranking stage, and cross-stage methods typically only add a downstream score factor to upstream ranking. Joint optimization of fusion modules across both stages remains largely unexplored. We propose UniRec, a Unified Cross-stage Recommendation Fusion model. First, the two fusion agents partially share input embeddings and are trained in a single computation graph, so gradients from either stage propagate through the shared representation and influence the other. Second, we introduce a dual-axis preference alignment objective: a vertical cross-stage consistency term transfers downstream pairwise preferences to the upstream fusion score, and a horizontal compact aggregation term reorganizes dozens of pairwise objectives over heterogeneous prior signals into bidirectional preference evidence. Third, we find that unconstrained end-to-end fusion optimization can exploit imbalances in item attribute distributions, over-concentrating on high-reward regions at the cost of other objectives. We therefore add an attribute group-relative regularization that computes advantages within attribute groups and normalizes the policy over the same groups, so uniformly promoting an entire high-reward group yields no optimization gain. Offline, UniRec consistently outperforms single-stage fusion and cross-stage coordination baselines. Online A/B tests show a 0.616\% gain in app usage duration. UniRec is fully deployed on the Kuaishou platform.

cs.IR

VikingRAG: Accurate and Token-efficient Retrieval-augmented Generation over Structured Documents

State-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods exploit document structures to acquire sufficient evidence, but often incur substantial token costs. To reduce structural-context tokens without compromising high RAG accuracy, we present {\sf VikingRAG}, a directory-aware semantic data management system that tightly integrates semantic and structural access to support structural-context-efficient, evidence-gap-driven multi-round retrieval. To further reduce token overhead of multi-round interaction, we materialize agentic multi-round retrieval traces as experience edges, and reuse these edges for similar queries, avoiding repeated multi-round exploration. To additionally reduce token costs when agentic multi-round retrieval is unnecessary, we introduce an adaptive escalation strategy that answers from one-round experience-augmented retrieval when the evidence is sufficient, and invokes agentic multi-round retrieval only otherwise. Experiments on real datasets show that the base system {\sf VikingRAG} matches high accuracy of state-of-the-art methods while consuming only 11.6\%--51.9\% of their tokens. With retrieval-trace reuse and adaptive escalation, token costs drop to 5.1\%--32.5\% while maintaining competitive accuracy and practical document-storage performance, showing the utility of this work for emerging AI knowledge bases.

cs.IR

TimelyRAG: Semantic-Temporal Hybrid Retrieval for Time-Critical Question Answering in Overlapping-Evolving Documents

Although large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have advanced open-domain question answering (QA), they remain unreliable when documents evolve through amendments. Existing time-sensitive retrieval methods address only the disjoint-evolving environment, where each update is an independent snapshot. However, laws, policies, and regulations often operate in overlapping-evolving environments, where amendments override earlier clauses while preserving most content, creating strong semantic overlap across versions. We propose TimelyRAG, a retriever-agnostic framework that incorporates temporal distance into ranking to align queries with version-appropriate documents. We also introduce TimelyQABench, the first benchmark for regulation-heavy domains with overlapping-evolving challenges. Experiments show consistent gains, up to +28.6% in nDCG@10, highlighting the importance of temporal reasoning for reliable QA over evolving documents. All resources are available at https://github.com/kaist-dmlab/TimelyRAG.

cs.IR