Comprehensive evaluation of the recommendation capabilities of existing foundation models across diverse datasets and domains is essential for advancing the development of recommendation foundation models. In this study, we introduce RecBench-MD, a novel and comprehensive benchmark designed to assess the recommendation abilities of foundation models from a zero-resource, multi-dataset, and multi-domain perspective. Through extensive evaluations of 19 foundation models across 15 datasets spanning 10 diverse domains -- including e-commerce, entertainment, and social media -- we identify key characteristics of these models in recommendation tasks. Our findings suggest that in-domain fine-tuning achieves optimal performance, while cross-dataset transfer learning provides effective practical support for new recommendation scenarios. Additionally, we observe that multi-domain training significantly enhances the adaptability of foundation models. All code and data have been publicly released to facilitate future research.
@article{arxiv.2508.21354,
title = {Evaluating Recabilities of Foundation Models: A Multi-Domain, Multi-Dataset Benchmark},
author = {Qijiong Liu and Jieming Zhu and Yingxin Lai and Xiaoyu Dong and Lu Fan and Zhipeng Bian and Zhenhua Dong and Xiao-Ming Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.21354},
year = {2025}
}