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LLM-Driven News Recommendation via Lightweight Task-Adaptive Modules

Han Wei Tong Niu Sisi Peng Minchen Xu Dan Qu

Jul 2026 · Applied Sciences · Vol 16, pp. 6818 · 1 citation · 29 references

TL;DR

This work proposes lightweight task-adaptive modules (TAMs), which keeps LLM parameters fixed and transforms offline embeddings into task-specialized representations without full-model backpropagation, drastically cutting training costs.

Abstract

Large language models produce semantically rich embeddings, yet direct employment of generic LLM embeddings fails to satisfy news recommendation demands due to inherent semantic mismatches with task targets. Existing fine-tuning methods including LoRA can narrow such gaps but bring prohibitive computational overhead, restricting real-world deployment. This work proposes lightweight task-adaptive modules (TAMs). It keeps LLM parameters fixed and transforms offline embeddings into task-specialized representations without full-model backpropagation, drastically cutting training costs. Evaluated on MIND benchmarks across ten mainstream recommendation architectures, TAMs achieves comparable accuracy to LoRA, with computational cost reduced to 1/10 of LoRA’s level. TAMs outperform GloVe-based models by 1.3–12.4% in AUC and scale effectively to MINDlarge. Ablation experiments confirm that the nonlinear projection is pivotal to performance improvement, and statistical validation across three random seeds confirms result robustness. This paradigm provides an efficient low-cost solution for LLM-based news recommendation under resource constraints.

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