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This paper introduces GenCAR, a novel approach to out-of-distribution (OOD) recommendation that addresses the challenge of balancing utility and risk by controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) of proxy labels. By framing OOD serving as the 伪-Valid Counterfactual Recommendation problem, GenCAR integrates preference-grounded counterfactual supervision with calibrated set selection to enhance candidate recovery. The method demonstrates a theoretical guarantee for controlling proxy-label FDR while significantly improving performance across various benchmarks, thus providing a robust solution for OOD scenarios.
GenCAR not only enhances candidate recovery in OOD recommendations but also guarantees control over false discovery rates, a critical factor often overlooked in existing methods.
Serving useful recommendations under distribution shift is crucial for balancing utility and risk in out-of-distribution (OOD) recommendation. However, most existing OOD methods improve ranking or construct counterfactual candidates without controlling the proxy-label false discovery rate (FDR) of the served set. In this work, we formulate OOD serving as the $\alpha$-Valid Counterfactual Recommendation ($\alpha$-VCR) problem to retain candidate support learned from counterfactual supervision while controlling proxy-label FDR, and propose GenCAR, which couples preference-grounded counterfactual supervision with calibrated set selection. In particular, GenCAR fixes the stable-preference representation while intervening on the environmental factor, grounds offline large language model proposals through preference anchors and trust-radius filtering, and uses conformal $p$-values for Benjamini--Hochberg selection. We theoretically bound conditional counterfactual approximation error and prove finite-sample, distribution-free control of proxy-label FDR under exchangeability and positive regression dependence, with a Benjamini--Yekutieli guarantee under arbitrary dependence. Extensive experiments audit realized proxy false discovery proportions and demonstrate that GenCAR consistently enhances OOD candidate recovery across diverse benchmarks.
