This reproducibility study confirms that incorporating generated natural‑language user profiles into recommender systems enhances transparency and allows users to directly intervene by correcting preferences or addressing cold‑start issues. The authors replicated the original findings and extended the evaluation with context ablation, multi‑seed stability tests, and mechanistic interpretability analysis using nnsight. Their results show that while perturbing profiles shifts predicted ratings uniformly across genres, the overall rankings remain unchanged, attributing this to the rating‑regression objective rather than the profile interface.
By Noah Mami\'e, Laurin van den Bergh
The paper introduces a counterfactual observability framework for Netflix’s recommender systems, aiming to disentangle raw engagement signals—such as views and clicks—from confounding factors like content quality, model behavior, presentation bias, and audience reach. It proposes three stakeholder‑centered principles and measurement methods that reduce bias, assess relativity, and capture incrementality, applicable to both single‑stage and cascading recommender architectures. The framework is demonstrated through multiple production deployments, showing its effectiveness in enhancing observability across Netflix’s recommendation pipelines.
By Chaoran Guo, Ding Tong, Ting-Po Lee, Scarlet Chen
arXiv:2607. 00010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are a core component of next-generation intelligent recommender systems because they enable users to actively elicit preferences, clarify intentions, and adapt recommendations in real time.
By Nipun B Nair, Tongtong Wu, Weiqing Wang
The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) can evaluate explanations in recommender systems. It generates 18 explanation prototypes and has 14 LLMs rate them, comparing the results to human ratings from a user study. Findings show that while LLMs mimic human rating patterns and correlate moderately with human judgments, their absolute agreement is low and varies with model size and evaluation design, leading to four practical recommendations for using LLMs in this context.
By Kathrin Wardatzky, Oana Inel, Luca Rossetto, Abraham Bernstein
arXiv:2606. 02883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommender systems have grown from content-organization tools into sophisticated systems that shape daily behavior.
By Amir Ghasemian, Homa Hosseinmardi, Upasana Dutta, Duncan J. Watts
arXiv:2607. 23647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can summarize heterogeneous user evidence in natural language, but current LLM recommenders often collapse enduring preferences, transient intent, and exposure-induced behavior into one profile.
By Gengyu Zhan
The paper introduces NPRec, a model‑agnostic framework that uses counterfactual reasoning to neutralize popularity bias in large language model–based recommender systems. By generating debiased textual guidelines that separate intrinsic user interests from popularity signals, NPRec injects these guidelines at inference time to guide the LLM’s generation without updating parameters. Experiments on three real‑world datasets show improved recommendation accuracy, explanation quality, and debiasing performance.
By Guanrong Li, Haolin Yang, Xinyu Liu, Zhen Wu, Rui Xia, Xinyu Dai
The study evaluates large language models (LLMs) as rerankers in conversational movie recommendation, comparing proprietary, open-weight, and fine-tuned LLMs against collaborative-filtering and sequential baselines on the ReDial benchmark. Results show that the best proprietary LLM achieves an NDCG@10 of 0.1497 with a shared semantic candidate pool, outperforming non-LLM baselines, while open-weight LLMs do not surpass a tuned shallow autoencoder under the same protocol. The analysis also highlights that reranker performance is highly sensitive to candidate generation, pool size, scoring policy, and decoding temperature, suggesting these factors should be reported as standard evaluation fields.
By Ante Kapetanovic, Tomislav Duricic, Andro Mercep, Emanuel Lacic
arXiv:2412. 20802v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recommender systems are widely used in the digital landscape to match users with content fitting their preferences.
By Aurore Archimbaud, Andreas Alfons, Ines Wilms
FacetCRS is a conversational recommender system that tackles the filter‑bubble problem by learning multi‑faceted user preferences—entity, word, context, and review facets—through natural language interactions. The framework adaptively models these preference facets and incorporates external knowledge to provide diverse recommendations. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that FacetCRS outperforms existing methods in reducing filter bubbles and improving recommendation quality.
By Yongsen Zheng, Ziliang Chen, Jinghui Qin, Liang Lin
LIGE‑GR is a framework that transitions traditional ranking‑based recommender systems to a generative, listwise approach inspired by large language models. It extends existing pointwise recommendation models into a listwise generation system, enabling sequence‑level optimization without overhauling the entire infrastructure. Experiments on Instagram Reels and Facebook Video show modest gains in user time spent—1.14 % and 0.72 % respectively—while adding only slight inference overhead.
By Venkat Srinivas, Chenzhang He, Sam Woodmansee, Shawn Lian, Wenjie Hu, Renjie Jiang, Ziheng Huang, Xinyuan Zhang, Zhihao Zheng, Zhuoran Yu, Rui Li, Lei Yuan, Ziwei Li, Jimmy Jia, Mert Terzihan, Ekrem Kocaguneli, Yiming Liao, Zhichen Zhao, Yue Yin, Yue Weng, Wanlin Ma, Xufeng Cai, Weimiao Wu, Yezhou Huang, Du Zhang, Yukun Ding, Aaron Johnston, Yueming Wang, Zhaojie Gong, Yuting Zhang, Serena Li, Adithya Ganesh, Boying Liu, Haichuan Yang, Xialu Li, Matt Ma, Qunshu Zhang, John Joshua Miller, Praveen Rathinavelu, Cheng Huang, Aadhar Sachdeva, Josh Karns, Andres Aaron Gutierrez, Neil Agarwal, Gustas Pladis, Vladimir Batygin, Gopal Ray, Aditya Priyadarshi, Shantanu Patil, Zhe Wang, Penny Pan, Yiping Han, Arun Singh, Guangdeng Liao, Bi Xue, Xinyao Hu, Yang Song, Yisong Song, Meihong Wang, Haotian Wu, Deepak Agarwal, Ji Liu
arXiv:2608.20801v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced reranking in recommendation, effectively leveraging item-side information remains chal...
By Dojun Hwang, Seunghan Lee, Cheonyoung Park, Sara Yu, SeongKu Kang