TRACER：用 Token 重分配实现生成式推荐中的概念擦除

View PDF HTML (experimental)

Abstract:Generative recommendation formulates next-item prediction as autoregressive generation over semantic ID (SID) sequences derived from users' historical interactions, making modern recommender systems structurally similar to large language models (LLMs). As privacy and safety concerns grow, these systems increasingly require concept unlearning to remove sensitive or harmful concepts associated with items. However, existing LLM unlearning methods cannot be directly applied to generative recommendation. Unlike word tokens with explicit semantics, SIDs are abstract identifiers that are often shared by both forget and retain items, leading to severe conflicts between concept removal and recommendation utility preservation.
To address this challenge, we propose TRACER, an end-to-end concept unlearning framework based on token reassignment. Rather than directly suppressing shared SIDs, TRACER reassigns concept-related items to alternative tokens that better facilitate forgetting while minimizing side effects on retained items. We further introduce a coherence regularizer to preserve semantic consistency among retain items during unlearning. Experiments on real-world recommendation datasets demonstrate that TRACER effectively removes target concepts while substantially better preserving recommendation utility than existing unlearning baselines.

Submission history

From: Jiali Cheng [view email]
[v1] Fri, 5 Jun 2026 05:19:31 UTC (871 KB)
[v2] Mon, 2 Nov 2026 15:46:16 UTC (940 KB)