HLLM: Enhancing Sequential Recommendations via Hierarchical Large Language Models for Item and User Modeling

HLLM-Creator: Hierarchical LLM-based Personalized Creative Generation

🔥 Update

• [2025.08.26] HLLM-Creator is released ! Find more details in Paper and README !
• [2024.09.20] HLLM Codes and Model Weights are released !

Installation

1. Install packages via pip3 install -r requirements.txt. Some basic packages are shown below :

   pytorch==2.3.1
   deepspeed==0.14.2
   transformers==4.51.0
   lightning==2.4.0
   flash-attn==2.5.9post1
   fbgemm-gpu==0.5.0 [optional for HSTU]
   sentencepiece==0.2.0 [optional for Baichuan2]

2. Prepare PixelRec and Amazon Book Reviews Datasets:
   1. Download PixelRec Interactions and Item Information from PixelRec and put into the dataset and information folder.
   2. Download Amazon Book Reviews Interactions and Item Information, process them by process_books.py, and put into the dataset and information folder. We also provide Interactions and Item Information of Books after processing.
   3. Please note that Interactions and Item Information should be put into two folders like:

      ├── dataset # Store Interactions
      │   ├── amazon_books.csv
      │   ├── Pixel1M.csv
      │   ├── Pixel200K.csv
      │   └── Pixel8M.csv
      └── information # Store Item Information
          ├── amazon_books.csv
          ├── Pixel1M.csv
          ├── Pixel200K.csv
          └── Pixel8M.csv

      Here dataset represents data_path, and infomation represents text_path.
3. Prepare pre-trained LLM models, such as TinyLlama, Baichuan2.

Training

To train HLLM on PixelRec / Amazon Book Reviews, you can run the following command.

Set master_addr, master_port, nproc_per_node, nnodes and node_rank in environment variables for multinodes training.

All hyper-parameters (except model’s config) can be found in code/REC/utils/argument_list.py and passed through CLI. More model’s hyper-parameters are in IDNet/* or HLLM/*.

# Item and User LLM are initialized by specific pretrain_dir.
python3 main.py \
--config_file overall/LLM_deepspeed.yaml HLLM/HLLM.yaml \ # We use deepspeed for training by default.
--loss nce \
--epochs 5 \
--dataset {Pixel200K / Pixel1M / Pixel8M / amazon_books} \
--train_batch_size 16 \
--MAX_TEXT_LENGTH 256 \
--MAX_ITEM_LIST_LENGTH 10 \
--checkpoint_dir saved_path \
--optim_args.learning_rate 1e-4 \
--item_pretrain_dir item_pretrain_dir \ # Set to LLM dir.
--user_pretrain_dir user_pretrain_dir \ # Set to LLM dir.
--text_path text_path \ # Use absolute path to text files.
--text_keys '[\"title\", \"tag\", \"description\"]' # Please remove tag in books dataset.

You can use --gradient_checkpointing True and --stage 3 with deepspeed to save memory.

You can also train ID-based models by the following command.

python3 main.py \
--config_file overall/ID.yaml IDNet/{hstu / sasrec / llama_id}.yaml \
--loss nce \
--epochs 201 \
--dataset {Pixel200K / Pixel1M / Pixel8M / amazon_books} \
--train_batch_size 64 \
--MAX_ITEM_LIST_LENGTH 10 \
--optim_args.learning_rate 1e-4

To reproduce our experiments on Pixel8M and Books you can run scripts in reproduce folder. You should be able to reproduce the following results.

For ID-based models, we follow the hyper-parameters from PixelRec and HSTU.

Method	Dataset	Negatives	R@10	R@50	R@200	N@10	N@50	N@200
HSTU	Pixel8M	5632	4.83	10.30	18.28	2.75	3.94	5.13
SASRec	Pixel8M	5632	5.08	10.62	18.64	2.92	4.12	5.32
HLLM-1B	Pixel8M	5632	6.13	12.48	21.18	3.54	4.92	6.22
HSTU-large	Books	512	5.00	11.29	20.13	2.78	4.14	5.47
SASRec	Books	512	5.35	11.91	21.02	2.98	4.40	5.76
HLLM-1B	Books	512	6.97	14.61	24.78	3.98	5.64	7.16
HSTU-large	Books	28672	6.50	12.22	19.93	4.04	5.28	6.44
HLLM-1B	Books	28672	9.28	17.34	27.22	5.65	7.41	8.89
HLLM-7B	Books	28672	9.39	17.65	27.59	5.69	7.50	8.99

Inference

We provide fine-tuned HLLM models for evaluation, you can download from the following links or huggingface. Remember put the weights to checkpoint_dir.

Model	Dataset	Weights
HLLM-1B	Pixel8M	HLLM-1B-Pixel8M
HLLM-1B	Books	HLLM-1B-Books-neg512
HLLM-1B	Books	HLLM-1B-Books
HLLM-7B	Books	HLLM-7B-Books

Please ensure compliance with the respective licenses of TinyLlama-1.1B and Baichuan2-7B when using corresponding weights.

Then you can evaluate models by the following command (the same as training but val_only).

python3 main.py \
--config_file overall/LLM_deepspeed.yaml HLLM/HLLM.yaml \ # We use deepspeed for training by default.
--loss nce \
--epochs 5 \
--dataset {Pixel200K / Pixel1M / Pixel8M / amazon_books} \
--train_batch_size 16 \
--MAX_TEXT_LENGTH 256 \
--MAX_ITEM_LIST_LENGTH 10 \
--checkpoint_dir saved_path \
--optim_args.learning_rate 1e-4 \
--item_pretrain_dir item_pretrain_dir \ # Set to LLM dir.
--user_pretrain_dir user_pretrain_dir \ # Set to LLM dir.
--text_path text_path \ # Use absolute path to text files.
--text_keys '[\"title\", \"tag\", \"description\"]' \ # Please remove tag in books dataset.
--val_only True # Add this for evaluation

Citation

If our work has been of assistance to your work, feel free to give us a star ⭐ or cite us using :

@article{HLLM,
title={HLLM: Enhancing Sequential Recommendations via Hierarchical Large Language Models for Item and User Modeling},
author={Junyi Chen and Lu Chi and Bingyue Peng and Zehuan Yuan},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.12740},
year={2024}
}

@article{HLLM-Creator,
title={HLLM-Creator: Hierarchical LLM-based Personalized Creative Generation},
author={Junyi Chen and Lu Chi and Siliang Xu and Shiwei Ran and Bingyue Peng and Zehuan Yuan},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.18118},
year={2025}
}

Thanks to the excellent code repository RecBole, VisRec, PixelRec and HSTU ! HLLM is released under the Apache License 2.0, some codes are modified from HSTU and PixelRec, which are released under the Apache License 2.0 and MIT License, respectively.