Reasoning over Semantic IDs Enhances Generative Recommendation

Abstract

Recent advances in generative recommendation have leveraged pretrained LLMs by formulating sequential recommendation as autoregressive generation over a unified token space comprising language tokens and itemic identifiers, where each item is represented by a compact sequence of discrete tokens, namely Semantic IDs (SIDs). This SID-based formulation enables efficient decoding over large-scale item corpora and provides a natural interface for LLM-based recommenders to leverage rich world knowledge. Meanwhile, breakthroughs in LLM reasoning motivate reasoning-enhanced recommendation, yet effective reasoning over SIDs remains underexplored and challenging. Itemic tokens are not natively meaningful to LLMs; moreover, recommendation-oriented SID reasoning is hard to evaluate, making high-quality supervision scarce. To address these challenges, we propose SIDReasoner, a two-stage framework that elicits reasoning over SIDs by strengthening SID--language alignment to unlock transferable LLM reasoning, rather than relying on large amounts of recommendation-specific reasoning traces. Concretely, SIDReasoner first enhances SID-language alignment via multi-task training on an enriched SID-centered corpus synthesized by a stronger teacher model, grounding itemic tokens in diverse semantic and behavioral contexts. Building on this enhanced alignment, SIDReasoner further improves recommendation reasoning through outcome-driven reinforced optimization, which guides the model toward effective reasoning trajectories without requiring explicit reasoning annotations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our reasoning-augmented SID-based generative recommendation. Beyond accuracy, the results highlight the broader potential of large reasoning models for generative recommendation, including improved interpretability and cross-domain generalization.