Breaking the Relevance-Diversity Seesaw: Hierarchical LLM Reasoning with RL for Industrial Novelty Recommendation

Novelty recommendation sustains long-term user engagement by exposing users to content that is both relevant and meaningfully different from their recent consumption. In large-scale e-commerce, this requires composing coherent yet non-redundant recommendation lists, a task fundamentally constrained by the relevance-diversity trade-off. Large language models (LLMs) offer a unified generative paradigm for inferring user intent and producing semantically coherent candidates, yet industrial deployment faces two critical challenges: (i) scarce supervision for modeling novelty transitions and diversity-aware list construction, and (ii) reward granularity mismatch, where standard RL assigns coarse sequence-level rewards that fail to capture item-level redundancy and complementarity. We present BALANCE, a hierarchical reasoning-and-generation framework that decomposes novelty recommendation into three structured stages: generating a Novelty Tag for exploration direction, refining an Interest Topic for intent specification, and constructing a Recommendation List for facet coverage. We address data scarcity through a self-reflection pipeline that synthesizes high-quality supervision by integrating real behavior logs with structured rationales. We resolve granularity mismatch through Sequence-Item Policy Optimization (SIPO), which jointly optimizes sequence- and item-level objectives via granularity-aware advantage fusion. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B test on the JD.com recommender system, validate the performance of our method, highlighting its superior novelty and diversity without compromising relevance.