LoopGR: Parameter-Efficient Scaling for Generative Recommendation via Recurrent Depth

Abstract

Generative recommendation formulates item recommendation as autoregressive generation rather than a discriminative scoring problem. Although empirical studies exhibit favorable scaling behavior in recommendation, unleashing the benefits of scaling remains challenging under the strict model size and inference cost constraints of real-world systems. A central challenge is to combine expressive modeling of user-item interaction histories with flexible computational depth without proportionally increasing model size. We introduce LoopGR, a parameter-efficient scaling framework for generative recommendation via recurrent depth. LoopGR employs a tailored hierarchical recurrent depth mechanism that alternates between a shared generative decoder and a lightweight context updater. For efficient inference, we further develop recurrent trajectory self-distillation that distills a low-budget student from a high-budget teacher by aligning both predictive distributions and evolution directions. Extensive experiments show that LoopGR consistently outperforms strong generative recommendation baselines. Compared with a representative encoder-decoder baseline, LoopGR achieves superior performance while reducing model size by up to 52%. These results establish recurrent depth as a new scaling dimension, offering a flexible and resource-efficient scaling path for generative recommendation.