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:2608. 10447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model-based recommender systems are increasingly adopting slow-thinking models that generate step-by-step reasoning before making predictions, often achieving higher accuracy than fast-thinking models that predict directly.
By Linh Dieu Le, Tong Chen, Shazia Sadiq, Hongzhi Yin, Ming Jin, Junliang Yu
The paper introduces a lifecycle framework for LLM-as-a-Judge systems used to evaluate recommendation explanations at Netflix. It outlines four phases—Birth, Training, Deployment, and Monitoring—detailing how each stage addresses specific technical and operational challenges. The authors report that after five weeks of A/B testing, judge-aligned explanations increased novel content viewing and successful browse-to-play sessions without quality takedowns.
By Emma Yanyang Kong, JJ Tan, Ishan Gupta, Lars Olds, Claire Campbell, David Fagnan, Veli Balin, Rohan Gosain, Louis Garcia, Minsu Jang
Large language model-based recommender systems are increasingly adopting slow-thinking models that generate step-by-step reasoning before making predictions, often achieving higher accuracy than fast-thinking models that predict directly. However, their reasoning traces are often unnecessarily verbose, increasing inference costs without commensurate accuracy gains.
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
arXiv:2606. 10156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As recommender systems transition toward agentic, multi-turn conversational interfaces, evaluation paradigms have struggled to keep pace.
By Bharath Sivaram Narasimhan, Karthik R Narasimhan
arXiv:2606. 14142v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge.
By Yinhan He, Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar, Jundong Li, Neil Shah, Donald Loveland
arXiv:2608. 08889v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recommendation systems thrive on personalization, where ''correctness'' is rarely a binary truth but a matter of subjective human preference.
By Juncheng Dong, Ding Tong, Ishan Gupta, Yuyan Wang
Although large language models (LLMs) have recently gained traction in recommender systems due to their strong reasoning capabilities and extensive world knowledge, previous LLM-based agents suffer from hallucination and context-length limitations, and thus are not suitable for full-ranking recommendation tasks. To circumvent these limitations through architectural design rather than modifying the LLM itself, we propose an agent-based recommendation framework, memory-based $\textbf{P}$ersonalized $\textbf{R}$ecommendation $\textbf{T}$ool learning via autonomous language $\textbf{A}$gents (PRTA), in which an LLM acts as a central planner interacting with multiple recommendation models as tools.
arXiv:2602. 07774v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge.
By Mingfu Liang, Yufei Li, Jay Xu, Kavosh Asadi, Xi Liu, Shuo Gu, Kaushik Rangadurai, Frank Shyu, Shuaiwen Wang, Song Yang, Zhijing Li, Jiang Liu, Mengying Sun, Fei Tian, Xiaohan Wei, Chonglin Sun, Jacob Tao, Shike Mei, Wenlin Chen, Santanu Kolay, Sandeep Pandey, Hamed Firooz, Luke Simon
arXiv:2607. 19739v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have recently gained traction in recommender systems due to their strong reasoning capabilities and extensive world knowledge, previous LLM-based agents suffer from hallucination and context-length limitations, and thus are not suitable for full-ranking recommendation tasks.
By Mingdai Yang, Zhiwei Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Yibo Wang, Hao Peng, Philip Yu
CRAMER is a framework that enables sequential recommendation models to adapt instantly to user requests by treating natural‑language requests as control signals and applying request‑aware masking to frozen backbone parameters. This approach avoids costly retraining or large language model inference, achieving minimal overhead. Experiments on large‑scale benchmarks demonstrate that CRAMER outperforms four state‑of‑the‑art request‑aware baselines while offering enhanced controllability and cross‑domain adaptability.
By Zhiyuan Julian Su, Naihe Feng, Zhen Luther Qin, Ga Wu