RoFiGR: Coarse Routing, Fine Refinement via Level-Adaptive Distillation in Multimodal Generative Recommendation
Abstract: Generative recommenders predict an item's semantic identifier (SID) one code at a time. Early codes select broad branches, so a routing error can exclude relevant items before fine-grained prediction begins. In multimodal recommendation, these coarse decisions must reflect collaborative preferences as well as item semantics. We introduce RoFiGR, a two-tree recommender that uses collaborative information in both SID construction and generation. It aligns cumulative L1-L2 code vectors with frozen collaborative item embeddings and explicitly encodes item distance and source level in the serialized history. During generation, a sequential teacher supervises legal branches. Fixed coarse-level weights maintain routing supervision, while a bounded adaptive residual allocates additional weight according to teacher-student demand. On Instruments, Arts, and Games, RoFiGR improves all five ranking metrics over the evaluated external baselines. Five-seed paired tests with Holm correction support the main NDCG@10 improvements. Comparisons with alternative collaborative supervision objectives and tokenizers support the proposed design. Matched task and decoding analyses distinguish the effects of training exposure, stream fusion, and candidate budgets.