Conditional Memory Enhanced Item Representation for Generative Recommendation

Abstract

Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising paradigm that predicts target items by autoregressively generating their semantic identifiers (SID). Most GR methods follow a quantization-representation-generation pipeline. While most research focuses on quantization and generation, the representation that bridges the two remains underexplored. Existing representation constructions mainly take two forms: either directly flattening the SID code embeddings into a sequence or merging them into a compact vector via external networks. While effective, they still expose two practical challenges: \textbf{1) Loss of item semantics:} Information lost by quantization or compression needs to be recovered during the representation stage. \textbf{2) Insufficient modeling of structured SID relations:} Intra-item code composition patterns and inter-item prefix-transition patterns are not explicitly preserved for representation and subsequent SID generation. To overcome these challenges, we propose \textbf{ComeIR}, a \textbf{\uline{Co}}nditional \textbf{\uline{me}}mory Enhanced \textbf{\uline{I}}tem \textbf{\uline{R}}epresentation framework that reconstructs SID code embeddings into item-aware inputs and preserves structured SID evidence for prediction. Item-guided Token Scoring estimates the contribution of each SID code using the item embedding employed by the quantizer. Dual-level Conditional Memory captures intra-item prefix composition and inter-item prefix transitions, while Memory Merge integrates these signals into each historical item representation. The Memory-restoring Prediction Head further conditions SID-level prediction on the generated prefix and historical transition evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of ComeIR, and further reveal scalable gains from enlarging conditional memory.