Rethinking Semantic Alignment in LLM-Enhanced Collaborative Filtering: A Spectral Decoupling Approach

Abstract

Recent advances in LLM-enhanced recommendation commonly align semantic representations with collaborative embeddings in a shared space, yet how alignment affects LLM-encoded information remains unclear. In this work, we revisit LLM-enhanced recommendation from a spectral perspective and show that collaborative and semantic signals benefit from different spectral parts. While collaborative representations are dominated by smooth low-frequency components due to user-item homophily, semantic embeddings contain useful non-principal singular components. Through component-wise evaluation and training-dynamics analysis, we find that alignment increasingly concentrates learned representations in dominant collaborative and principal semantic subspaces, reducing overlap with non-principal semantic components. Controlled comparisons show that non-principal components provide inconsistent gains under alignment but consistently improve performance through component-level decoupling, while full prediction-level decoupling achieves the best overall performance. These results indicate that alignment fails to effectively exploit complementary non-principal semantic information. Motivated by these findings, we propose UniSpecRec (Unifying Spectral Signals for Recommendation), which applies signal-specific spectral filtering while preserving collaborative and semantic representations in their respective spaces. UniSpecRec combines their predictions without cross-space alignment or additional trainable parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness, efficiency, and generalizability.