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This paper investigates popularity bias in generative recommendation (GeneRec) systems, finding that imbalanced tokenization and training procedures exacerbate the issue. To address this, they propose CRAB, a post-hoc debiasing strategy that rebalances the codebook by splitting over-popular tokens while preserving semantic structure. Experiments on real-world datasets show CRAB significantly improves recommendation performance by mitigating popularity bias.
Generative recommendation models can amplify popularity bias due to imbalanced tokenization, but a simple codebook rebalancing strategy can significantly improve performance.
Generative recommendation (GeneRec) has introduced a new paradigm that represents items as discrete semantic tokens and predicts items in a generative manner. Despite its strong performance across multiple recommendation tasks, existing GeneRec approaches still suffer from severe popularity bias and may even exacerbate it. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis to uncover the root causes of this phenomenon, yielding two core insights: 1) imbalanced tokenization inherits and can further amplify popularity bias from historical item interactions; 2) current training procedures disproportionately favor popular tokens while neglecting semantic relationships among tokens, thereby intensifying popularity bias. Building on these insights, we propose CRAB, a post-hoc debiasing strategy for GeneRec that alleviates popularity bias by mitigating frequency imbalance among semantic tokens. Specifically, given a well-trained model, we first rebalance the codebook by splitting over-popular tokens while preserving their hierarchical semantic structure. Based on the adjusted codebook, we further introduce a tree-structured regularizer to enhance semantic consistency, encouraging more informative representations for unpopular tokens during training. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CRAB significantly improves recommendation performance by effectively alleviating popularity bias.
