@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-hsuga,
    title = "{HSUGA}: {LLM}-Enhanced Recommendation with Hierarchical Semantic Understanding and Group-Aware Alignment",
    author = "Li, Guorui  and
      Liu, Dugang  and
      Li, Lei  and
      Tang, Xing  and
      Ming, Zhong",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.726/",
    pages = "14774--14788",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Large language model (LLM)-enhanced sequential recommendation typically aims to improve two core components: user semantic embedding extraction and utilization. Despite promising results, existing methods still have two limitations: 1) In the extraction stage, most methods directly input long interaction sequence fragments into LLM for preference summarization. However, excessively long sequences increase inference difficulty, making it challenging to infer accurate user embeddings reliably. 2) In the utilization stage, most methods employ the same semantic embedding utilization strategy for all users, neglecting the differences caused by user activity levels, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose HSUGA, which introduces a simple yet effective plugin for each of the two core components: Hierarchical Semantic Understanding (HSU) and Group-Aware Alignment (GAA). HSU performs a staged two-phase preference mining and models preference evolution through constrained editing operations, thereby improving the reliability of user semantic extraction. GAA adjusts the semantic utilization intensity based on user activity levels, providing weaker alignment for active users and stronger guidance for users with sparse historical data. Finally, extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and compatibility of HSUGA."
}