Large language models are zero-shot point-of-interest recommenders

Joeun Kim, Youngjin Seo, Yeonsoo Kim, Junhyeok Kang, Jeeho Shin, Patara Trirat, Jae-Gil Lee

Abstract: Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation systems play an important role in various location-based services by improving the user experience. Previous research has leveraged large-scale visit records to predict a user’s next visit POI based on the behavior of similar users. However, with the increasing emphasis on privacy preservation, there is a shift towards zero-shot recommendation that does not require training and only uses individual visit history data. As a better alternative to traditional zero-shot recommender systems, this paper proposes a novel zero-shot recommender system leveraging the ability of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to understand human behavior called ZeroPOIRec. ZeroPOIRec involves a profiler module that enables LLMs to extract individual user preferences from multiple aspects, including spatio-temporal patterns and individual characteristics, and a recommender module that enhances the zero-shot POI recommendation performance via candidate refinement and prioritization. Through experiments using a benchmark dataset and a newly introduced real-world dataset with semantic variables, we demonstrate that, despite ZeroPOIRec being a zero-shot approach, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of recommendation performance.

External IDs:dblp:journals/datamine/KimSKKSTL25