P$^3$Rec: Distilling Prior--Posterior Preference Reasoning for LLM-based Recommendation

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong semantic understanding and preference reasoning capabilities, offering new opportunities for user modeling in recommender systems. Existing LLM-as-Enhancer methods typically distill LLM-derived preference knowledge into lightweight recommenders to avoid costly online LLM inference. However, they often construct distillation knowledge from only one perspective. Prior preference captures users' stable and consistent interests but provides limited guidance for the current decision, whereas posterior preference reveals target-relevant fine-grained interests but may rely excessively on target clues. To address these limitations, we propose P$^3$Rec, a framework that jointly extracts and internalizes complementary prior and posterior preference reasoning knowledge. Specifically, P$^3$Rec first derives target-agnostic prior preferences and target-conditioned posterior preferences from the user side, while further extracting item-centric preference representations from item semantics and predecessor interactions. It then progressively internalizes prior and posterior knowledge into behavioral representations through prior preference absorption and posterior-guided preference distillation. Since the resulting comprehensive preference representation may not always provide an equally decisive retrieval direction, P$^3$Rec further characterizes historical interest dispersion with interest entropy and adaptively calibrates the user representation before contrastive retrieval optimization. In this way, P$^3$Rec achieves more complete preference reasoning while preserving efficient recommendation. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate its effectiveness.