@inproceedings{ren-huang-2025-easyrec,
    title = "{E}asy{R}ec: Simple yet Effective Language Models for Recommendation",
    author = "Ren, Xubin  and
      Huang, Chao",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.894/",
    pages = "17728--17743",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Deep neural networks have emerged as a powerful technique for learning representations from user-item interaction data in collaborative filtering (CF) for recommender systems. However, many existing methods heavily rely on unique user and item IDs, which restricts their performance in zero-shot learning scenarios. Inspired by the success of language models (LMs) and their robust generalization capabilities, we pose the question: How can we leverage language models to enhance recommender systems? We propose EasyRec, an effective approach that integrates text-based semantic understanding with collaborative signals. EasyRec employs a text-behavior alignment framework that combines contrastive learning with collaborative language model tuning. This ensures strong alignment between text-enhanced semantic representations and collaborative behavior information. Extensive evaluations across diverse datasets show EasyRec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, particularly in text-based zero-shot recommendation. EasyRec functions as a plug-and-play component that integrates seamlessly into collaborative filtering frameworks. This empowers existing systems with improved performance and adaptability to user preferences. Implementation codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/EasyRec"
}