Generative Recommendation with Semantic IDs (GRID)

GRID (Generative Recommendation with Semantic IDs) is a state-of-the-art framework for generative recommendation systems using semantic IDs, developed by a group of scientists and engineers from Snap Research. This project implements novel approaches for learning semantic IDs from text embedding and generating recommendations through transformer-based generative models.

🚀 Overview

GRID facilitates generative recommendation three overarching steps:

• Embedding Generation with LLMs: Converting item text into embeddings using any LLMs available on Huggingface.
• Semantic ID Learning: Converting item embedding into hierarchical semantic IDs using Residual Quantization techniques such as RQ-KMeans, RQ-VAE, RVQ.
• Generative Recommendations: Using transformer architectures to generate recommendation sequences as semantic ID tokens.

📦 Installation

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• CUDA-compatible GPU (recommended)

Setup Environment

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/snap-research/GRID.git
cd GRID

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

🎯 Quick Start

1. Data Preparation

Prepare your dataset in the expected format:

data/
├── train/       # training sequence of user history 
├── validation/  # validation sequence of user history 
├── test/        # testing sequence of user history 
└── items/       # text of all items in the dataset

We provide pre-processed Amazon data explored in the P5 paper [4]. The data can be downloaded from this google drive link.

2. Embedding Generation with LLMs

Generate embeddings from LLMs, which later will be transformed into semantic IDs.

python -m src.inference experiment=sem_embeds_inference_flat data_dir=data/amazon_data/beauty # avaiable data includes 'beauty', 'sports', and 'toys'

3. Train and Generate Semantic IDs

Learn semantic ID centroids for embeddings generated in step 2:

python -m src.train experiment=rkmeans_train_flat \
    data_dir=data/amazon_data/beauty \
    embedding_path=<output_path_from_step_2>/merged_predictions_tensor.pt \ # this can be found in the log dirs in step2
    embedding_dim=2048 \ # the model dimension of the LLMs you use in step 2. 2048 for flan-t5-xl as used in this example.
    num_hierarchies=3 \  # we train 3 codebooks
    codebook_width=256 \ # each codebook has 256 rows of centroids  

Generate SIDs:

python -m src.inference experiment=rkmeans_inference_flat \
    data_dir=data/amazon_data/beauty \
    embedding_path=<output_path_from_step_2>/merged_predictions_tensor.pt \ 
    embedding_dim=2048 \ 
    num_hierarchies=3 \  
    codebook_width=256 \ 
    ckpt_path=<the_checkpoint_you_just_get_above> # this can be found in the log dir for training SIDs

4. Train Generative Recommendation Model with Semantic IDs

Train the recommendation model using the learned semantic IDs:

python -m src.train experiment=tiger_train_flat \
    data_dir=data/amazon_data/beauty \ 
    semantic_id_path=<output_path_from_step_3>/pickle/merged_predictions_tensor.pt \
    num_hierarchies=4 # Please note that we add 1 for num_hierarchies because in the previous step we appended one additional digit to de-duplicate the semantic IDs we generate.

4. Generate Recommendations

Run inference to generate recommendations:

python -m src.inference experiment=tiger_inference_flat \
    data_dir=data/amazon_data/beauty \ 
    semantic_id_path=<output_path_from_step_3>/pickle/merged_predictions_tensor.pt \
    ckpt_path=<the_checkpoint_you_just_get_above> \ # this can be found in the log dir for training GR models
    num_hierarchies=4 \ # Please note that we add 1 for num_hierarchies because in the previous step we appended one additional digit to de-duplicate the semantic IDs we generate.

Supported Models:

Semantic ID:

1. Residual K-means proposed in One-Rec [2]
2. Residual Vector Quantization
3. Residual Quantization with Variational Autoencoder [3]

Generative Recommendation:

1. TIGER [1]

📚 Citation

If you use GRID in your research, please cite:

@inproceedings{grid,
  title     = {Generative Recommendation with Semantic IDs: A Practitioner's Handbook},
  author    = {Ju, Clark Mingxuan and Collins, Liam and Neves, Leonardo and Kumar, Bhuvesh and Wang, Louis Yufeng and Zhao, Tong and Shah, Neil},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)},
  year      = {2025}
}

🤝 Acknowledgments

• Built with PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning
• Configuration management by Hydra
• Inspired by recent advances in generative AI and recommendation systems
• Part of this repo is built on top of https://github.com/ashleve/lightning-hydra-template

📞 Contact

For questions and support:

• Create an issue on GitHub
• Contact the development team: Clark Mingxuan Ju ([email protected]), Liam Collins ([email protected]), and Leonardo Neves ([email protected]).

Bibliography

[1] Rajput, Shashank, et al. "Recommender systems with generative retrieval." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (2023): 10299-10315.

[2] Deng, Jiaxin, et al. "Onerec: Unifying retrieve and rank with generative recommender and iterative preference alignment." arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.18965 (2025).

[3] Lee, Doyup, et al. "Autoregressive image generation using residual quantization." Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. 2022.

[4] Geng, Shijie, et al. "Recommendation as language processing (rlp): A unified pretrain, personalized prompt & predict paradigm (p5)." Proceedings of the 16th ACM conference on recommender systems. 2022.