Teaching LLMs to Speak Spotify — Yves Raimond & Jacqueline Wood, Spotify

This talk details Spotify's development of the Large Taste Model, an LLM-native system for generative personalization. It introduces the NEO training recipe, which involves adding semantic IDs to an open-weight LLM (like Qwen) and grounding these new tokens while keeping the backbone frozen. This approach preserves the LLM's general language abilities, unlike continued pre-training. The model is then instruction-tuned across various Spotify tasks, leading to improvements like cold-starting audiobook recommendations. The talk also discusses decoding strategies and how grounding LLM judges with user profiles and behavior increased their agreement with humans by 91% on ambiguous queries, improving evaluation set scaling.