arXiv Machine Learning

Benchmarking In-context Experiential Learning Through Repeated Product Recommendations

arXiv:2511. 22130v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To navigate ever-shifting real-world environments, agents must grapple with incomplete knowledge and adapt their strategies through experience.

arXiv AI
4d ago

Challenges and Solutions for Bandits in the Wild: Warm-Started Mixture Bandits for Cross-Cohort Slate Recommendation

arXiv:2609.37800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many recommender services repeatedly encounter cold-start cohorts, where new users arrive with little or no interaction history. This creates two cha...

By Serafima Lebedeva, Sumantrak Mukherjee, Ali Arshad Sadal, Ilias Ek\c{s}i, Rahul Sharma, Julia Mueller, Theresa Dombrowski, Jakob Karolus, Viktor Bengs, Eyke H\"ullermeier, Sebastian Vollmer
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Safety as a Constraint: Fine-Tuning a LLM Recommender to Explain Itself

The paper presents a method for fine‑tuning a large language model (LLM) recommender to generate personalized, non‑harmful explanations for its recommendations. By training two LLM‑judge reward models and using constrained GRPO, the authors achieve a significant increase in the PASS rate for all three criteria, from 0.649 to 0.956 on their own judges and from 0.677 to 0.931 on an independent judge. The fine‑tuned model maintains its original recommendation performance, demonstrating that LLM‑based recommenders can be adapted to complex tasks without loss of effectiveness.

By Jiashu He, Emma Yanyang Kong, JJ Tan, David Fagnan
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Self-Evolving Memory for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2609.15598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation has emerged as a promising end-to-end paradigm for personalized recommendation. However, user preferences continuously evol...

By Xinyu Lin, Zhuosong Jiang, Zixiao Suo, Siqin Wang, Hanqing Zeng, Hanchao Yu, Yinglong Xia, Jiang Zhang, Aashu Singh, Fei Liu, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Yang Song, Qifan Wang, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv AI
Jun 16

LatentGym: A Testbed For Cross-Task Experiential Learning With Controllable Latent Structure

arXiv:2606. 15306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision continually learning agentic systems that become more useful over time: as they encounter sequences of related tasks, they should infer the hidden structure shared across those tasks and use it to improve future decisions.

By Daksh Mittal, Tommaso Castellani, Thomson Yen, Naimeng Ye, Fangyu Wu, Minghui Chen, Tiffany Cai, Emmanouil Koukoumidis, William Zeng, Hongseok Namkoong
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

CORAL: An LLM-Native Harness for Production Recommender Systems

CORAL is an LLM‑native harness that automates continual optimization of production recommender systems. It operates in a closed loop: an agent observes system signals, reasons over past decisions, and uses tools—including a numerical optimizer—to reconfigure the recommender while staying within a fixed operating budget. In A/B experiments on two large social platforms, CORAL improved engagement without extra serving cost on one platform and reduced serving cost without harming engagement on the other, demonstrating that a single agentic loop can replace manual engineering for ongoing system tuning.

By Muhammad Rafay Azhar, Yuhang Zhou, Gilbert Jiang, Yuchen Wang, Rahul Sharma, Matthew DeSousa, Jiayi Liu, Xin Guo, Lizhu Zhang, Xiangjun Fan
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Efficient Exploration Is Enough

arXiv:2609.07575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work introduces an alternative view of efficient exploration and studies its theoretical and empirical implications in the absence of extrinsic...

By Mikel Malag\'on, Jon Vadillo, Josu Ceberio, Michael Bowling, Jose A. Lozano
arXiv AI
3d ago

RealWorldShop: Benchmarking and Improving Conversational Shopping Agents in Real-World E-commerce

RealWorldShop introduces a new benchmark for conversational shopping agents, featuring 3.28 million grounded products, structured shopping episodes, a profile‑grounded user simulator, and role‑play evaluation. Analysis reveals that existing systems generate locally plausible responses but struggle with state tracking, constraint updating, and grounded convergence, especially in ambiguous or multi‑intent scenarios. The authors propose REALSHOP_AGENT, a session‑control framework with explicit state management, shopping‑flow control, catalog‑grounded retrieval, and runtime guards, which consistently outperforms strong baselines on the benchmark.

By Xinwei Yang, Kelong Mao, Yudong Guo, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu, Chen Huang, Wenqiang Lei