Sakana AI proposes QD-Rec, a Quality-Diversity recommendation method that pairs candidates with LLM-written hypotheses

Sakana AI developed QD-Rec, a recommendation method that treats a candidate plus a hypothesis explaining why to choose it as the unit of recommendation and uses Quality-Diversity search to accumulate high-quality, diverse proposals. In experiments on M&A, customer targeting and paper recommendation, QD-Rec built archives with higher average scores and larger size than a baseline that writes each hypothesis from scratch, and its code is released on GitHub. The paper reports cases where a hypothesis scored 1 out of 10 for one company was mutated and transferred to another candidate, raising the score to 5.