Think-to-Personalize: Unifying Reasoning and Retrieval for User-Centric Personalized Dense Retrieval

Abstract

Dense retrieval has become a cornerstone of modern local-lifestyle e-commerce search by encoding queries and items into semantic embedding spaces. While recent advancements have transitioned from BERT-based embedding models to Large Language Models (LLMs), most approaches still treat LLMs as static text encoders, neglecting their inherent reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, standard dense retrieval models remain query-centric, which is insufficient in e-commerce scenarios where sparse and ambiguous queries create an intent gap that can only be bridged by the rich context of user history. Meanwhile, existing personalized retrieval methods typically rely on implicit embedding interactions, which lack the reasoning capability to effectively disambiguate user intent from noisy historical behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose Think-to-Personalize (TTP), a novel framework that unifies explicit user-centric intent reasoning with dense retrieval. By reasoning over the user's historical purchase sequence, TTP explicitly deduces latent personalized needs and generates an intent-enhanced query, which is then encoded into a unified dense embedding. Specifically, we design a two-stage training paradigm: (1) a Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) stage that establishes cold-start capabilities; and (2) a Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage that aligns the reasoning process with retrieval utility using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Extensive experiments on both proprietary and public benchmarks demonstrate that TTP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, in online A/B tests, it achieved a +0.46% lift in order volume, validating its practical effectiveness and establishing a new paradigm for reasoning-driven personalized dense retrieval.