Collaboration of Large Language Models and Small Recommendation Models for Device-Cloud Recommendation
Zheqi Lv, Tianyu Zhan, Wenjie Wang, Xinyu Lin, Shengyu Zhang, Wenqiao Zhang, Jiwei Li, Kun Kuang, Fei Qing Wu · 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) for Recommendation (LLM4Rec) is a promising research direction that has demonstrated exceptional performance in this field. However, its inability to capture real-time user preferences greatly limits the practical application of LLM4Rec because (i) LLMs are costly to train and infer frequently, and (ii) LLMs struggle to access real-time data (its large number of parameters poses an obstacle to deployment on devices). Fortunately, small recommendation models (SRMs) can effectively supplement these shortcomings of LLM4Rec diagrams by consuming minimal resources for frequent training and inference, and by conveniently accessing real-time data on devices.