Normative Alignment of Recommender Systems via Internal Label Shift

Recommender systems optimized solely for user engagement often fail to meet broader normative objectives such as fairness, diversity, or editorial values. We introduce NAILS (Normative Alignment of recommender systems via Internal Label Shift), a simple and scalable method for aligning recommendation outputs with target distributions over item-level attributes (e.g., categories). NAILS modifies the user-conditional item distribution to induce a specified marginal distribution over attributes, leveraging existing user–item preferences without retraining the model. To achieve this, we recast the problem as a form of label shift applied internally within a hierarchical classification framework. Adopting a stakeholder-centric perspective, NAILS enables alignment with global normative goals. Empirically, we show that NAILS consistently improves attribute-level alignment with minimal impact on user engagement, providing a practical mechanism for value-driven recommendation. Our code is available at https://github.com/johanneskruse/nails.