GNN-Based Item Indexing for LLM-Enhanced Recommendation

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed recommender systems through strong semantic understanding and generalization. However, the design of item identifiers remains a critical bottleneck that directly affects recommendation quality. Traditional metadata-based identifiers introduce length variability and semantic ambiguity, whereas existing collaborative indexing (CID) approaches often neglect item attributes, show limited cross-dataset generalizability, and incur high computational cost at scale. To address these limitations, we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN)–based item indexing framework with three coordinated innovations. First, we construct attribute-enriched co-occurrence graphs and use a GNN encoder to fuse item features with collaborative signals, yielding semantically informed representations that work well for attribute-rich catalogs. Second, we replace recursive spectral clustering with hierarchical agglomerative clustering on GNN embeddings, enabling direct control of index length via tree depth and reducing hyperparameter tuning across datasets. Third, we exploit localized message passing rather than global eigendecomposition, which provides considerably better runtime efficiency and is amenable to mini-batch training, supporting online index updates as interactions evolve. Across five benchmarks, GID achieves strong average ranking performance, showing larger improvements on sparse and attribute-rich datasets while remaining competitive in dense settings. The framework is robust under both seen and unseen prompt templates, which supports practical LLM-based recommendation. On sequential recommendation, GID improves HR@10 by 7.9% on average over the strongest baseline in each dataset.