Addressing Cross-Stage Decoupling of Semantic and Collaborative Signals in Generative Recommendation

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Generative recommendation reformulates sequential recommendation as autoregressive generation by encoding items into semantic tokens, enabling improved scaling capability and cross-domain generalization. However, existing generative recommender systems typically follow a two-stage pipeline, where item tokenization is largely dominated by textual semantics with limited incorporation of collaborative signals and interaction similarity, leading to code assignments that are misaligned with downstream generation. Conversely, the generation stage tends to overlook the original semantic information, as the code sequences are re-embedded based on interaction data. This cross-stage information decoupling limits semantic coherence and recommendation accuracy. To address this issue, we propose SCRec, a general framework that enhances cross-stage coherence through bidirectional information supplementation. Specifically, we introduce (i) collaborative-enhanced tokenization to explicitly inject textualized collaborative signals into semantic tokenization, without introducing additional alignment task, (ii) semantic-guided generation to dynamically recalibrate semantic priors with learnable code embeddings in generation stage, and (iii) manifold alignment to reconcile the geometric mismatch between the embedding space of discrete codebook indices and the dense continuous semantic space. These interrelated components form a general framework that aligns semantic and collaborative signals and enhances cross-stage information coherence, with minimal additional training and inference costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and generalizability of our proposed framework.