Awakening Dormant Users: Generative Recommendation with Counterfactual Functional Role Reasoning

2026-02-13Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval
AI summary

The authors focus on re-engaging users who visit an e-commerce site but rarely make purchases. They say past methods only look at immediate item value, ignoring how some items influence future buying decisions. To fix this, they created RoleGen, a system that uses a smart language model to understand how items change user intent over time and simulate different buying paths. Their tests on a real platform show this approach helps sell more products by better predicting user behavior.

dormant usersconversion trajectorylarge language modelcounterfactual inferencee-commerce platformsuser intentRecall@1A/B testinggenerative modelrecommendation systems
Authors
Huishi Luo, Shuokai Li, Hanchen Yang, Zhongbo Sun, Haojie Ding, Boheng Zhang, Zijia Cai, Renliang Qian, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Chenyi Lei, Wenwu Ou, Fuzhen Zhuang
Abstract
Awakening dormant users, who remain engaged but exhibit low conversion, is a pivotal driver for incremental GMV growth in large-scale e-commerce platforms. However, existing approaches often yield suboptimal results since they typically rely on single-step estimation of an item's intrinsic value (e.g., immediate click probability). This mechanism overlooks the instrumental effect of items, where specific interactions act as triggers to shape latent intent and drive subsequent decisions along a conversion trajectory. To bridge this gap, we propose RoleGen, a novel framework that synergizes a Conversion Trajectory Reasoner with a Generative Behavioral Backbone. Specifically, the LLM-based Reasoner explicitly models the context-dependent Functional Role of items to reconstruct intent evolution. It further employs counterfactual inference to simulate diverse conversion paths, effectively mitigating interest collapse. These reasoned candidate items are integrated into the generative backbone, which is optimized via a collaborative "Reasoning-Execution-Feedback-Reflection" closed-loop strategy to ensure grounded execution. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing on the Kuaishou e-commerce platform demonstrate that RoleGen achieves a 6.2% gain in Recall@1 and a 7.3% increase in online order volume, confirming its effectiveness in activating the dormant user base.