L2Rec: Towards Dual-View Understanding of LLMs for Personalized Recommendation

Abstract

Adapting large language models (LLMs) for personalized recommendation requires aligning their general-purpose capabilities with user-specific preferences while effectively leveraging both behavioral and semantic signals. Existing approaches typically integrate these signals at either the input level (e.g., injecting behavioral embeddings into the token space) or the output level (e.g., contrastive alignment of separate encoders), suffering from distribution gaps or lack of end-to-end task supervision. In this work, we introduce L2Rec, which unifies behavioral and semantic understanding at the parameter level of LLMs. Our key insight is that the same set of Transformer parameters can serve as a shared medium for both views: by applying view-specific, personalized low-rank perturbations via a Dual-view Personalized Mixture-of-Experts (DPMoE) mechanism, L2Rec enables a single LLM backbone to produce complementary behavioral and semantic adaptations for each user with minimal representation-level misalignment. An adaptive cross-view fusion module further integrates the dual-view outputs into a unified user preference. Experiments on four datasets show that L2Rec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and online A/B testing on a large-scale industrial platform validates significant improvements in key engagement metrics.