Diffusion Generative Recommendation with Continuous Tokens

Abstract

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), have opened new opportunities for enhancing recommender systems (RecSys). Most existing LLM-based RecSys approaches operate in a discrete space, using vector-quantized tokenizers to align with the inherent discrete nature of language models. However, these quantization methods often result in lossy tokenization and suboptimal learning, primarily due to inaccurate gradient propagation caused by the non-differentiable argmin operation in standard vector quantization. Inspired by the emerging trend of embracing continuous tokens in language models, we propose ContRec, a novel framework that seamlessly integrates continuous tokens into LLM-based RecSys. Specifically, ContRec consists of two key modules: a sigma-VAE Tokenizer, which encodes users/items with continuous tokens; and a Dispersive Diffusion module, which captures implicit user preference. The tokenizer is trained with a continuous Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) objective, where three effective techniques are adopted to avoid representation collapse. By conditioning on the previously generated tokens of the LLM backbone during user modeling, the Dispersive Diffusion module performs a conditional diffusion process with a novel Dispersive Loss, enabling high-quality user preference generation through next-token diffusion. Finally, ContRec leverages both the textual reasoning output from the LLM and the latent representations produced by the diffusion model for Top-K item retrieval, thereby delivering comprehensive recommendation results. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that ContRec consistently outperforms both traditional and SOTA LLM-based recommender systems. Our results highlight the potential of continuous tokenization and generative modeling for advancing the next generation of recommender systems.