BLAIR benchmark tests 11 LLMs as recommendation encoders, releases 571M-review Amazon dataset

burkov · x · 2026-11-03

General text-embedding leaderboards don't predict how well models work inside recommendation systems, where item descriptions are short/noisy and embeddings feed downstream recommenders. BLAIR addresses this gap by benchmarking 11 language models as semantic encoders across sequential recommendation, collaborative filtering, and product search. It also releases Amazon Reviews 2023 (571M+ reviews, 48M items) and adds a complex-query search task for long natural-language requests, using queries generated from Amazon reviews plus real user queries.

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