Developing generative recommender systems for government subsidy programs with a new RQ‐VAE model: Wello and the Korean government case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract According to an industry survey, many people miss opportunities to apply for government subsidy programs because they do not know how to apply. People also need to search manually and check whether these programs are suitable for them. To address this issue, our study developed a new generative recommender system with both users' information and government subsidy documents. Within our recommender system framework, we modify the existing Residual Quantization Variational Auto‐Encoder (RQ‐VAE) model to capture deep and abstract information from subsidy documents. Using semantic IDs generated for approximately 185,610 user click‐stream histories and 240,000 documents, we train our recommender system to predict the semantic IDs of the next subsidy policy documents in which a user might be interested. In 2024, we successfully deployed our generative recommender system in Wello, a Korean Gov‐Tech startup. In collaboration with the Korean government, our generative recommender system helped enhance program effectiveness by saving $7.8 million in unused funds and achieved $27.4 million in advertising efficiency gains. Also, Wello observed a 68% improvement in Click‐Through‐Ratio (CTR), increasing from 41.4% in the third quarter of 2024 to 69.6% in the fourth quarter of 2024. We thus anticipate that our generative recommender system will have a significant impact on both individuals and the government.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".