Large language models for intent-driven session recommendations

The goal of intent-aware session recommendation (ISR) approaches is to capture user intents within a session for accurate next-item prediction. However, the capability of these approaches is limited by assuming all sessions have a uniform and fixed number of intents. In reality, user sessions can vary, where the number of intentions may differ from one to another. Moreover, they can only learn user intents in the latent space, which further restricts the model's transparency. To ease these issues, we propose a simple yet effective paradigm for ISR motivated by the advanced reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we first create an initial prompt to instruct LLMs to predict the next item by inferring varying user intents reflected in a session. Then, we propose an effective optimization mechanism to automatically optimize prompts with an iterative self-reflection. Finally, we leverage the robust generalizability of LLMs across diverse domains to efficiently select the optimal prompt for ISR. As such, the proposed paradigm effectively guides LLMs to identify varying user intents at a semantic level, thus delivering more accurate and comprehensible recommendations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets verify the superiority of our proposed method.