REPREC: Representation Driven Parameter-Efficient Recommendation System

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have been applied to sequential recommendation by incorporating collaborative signals through input conditioning or model adaptation. However, existing approaches often require LLM fine-tuning, additional architectural modules, representation distillation, or item-level conditioning over long interaction histories, increasing computational and deployment costs. We propose REPREC, a lightweight framework that conditions a frozen LLM using compact user-level representations. REPREC maps a fixed-size embedding from a frozen sequential encoder into a small set of learned soft tokens through an MLP injector, training only the injector while leaving both pretrained backbones unchanged. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that REPREC consistently improves recommendation performance across different sequential encoders, LLM backbones, and user activity levels. Its compact conditioning mechanism also makes REPREC computationally efficient during both training and inference. Moreover, training with short histories while evaluating with longer contexts retains 94--99\% of full-history performance while achieving an average $1.50\times$ per-epoch training speedup. The code is available at: https://github.com/phdbotcode/REPREC