RPCBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate large language models’ ability to critique recommendation requests by detecting, diagnosing, and handling flawed premises. It includes evidence‑grounded test instances across five recommendation domains and ten types of premise failures, and introduces a fine‑grained evaluation framework covering detection, error localization, handling strategy, and evidence faithfulness. Experiments with 11 LLMs reveal that proactive detection is the main bottleneck, with models struggling most on underspecified‑premise errors and showing that optimal critique quality occurs at intermediate reasoning lengths.
By Zhongru Chen, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang
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
arXiv:2607. 01387v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommender systems are vital in helping users navigate vast amounts of information, offering personalized suggestions and effective explanations for these recommendations.
By Longfeng Wu, Yao Zhou, Tong Zeng, Zhimin Peng, Bhanu Pratap Singh Rawat, Lecheng Zheng, Giovanni Seni, Dawei Zhou
Recommender systems are vital in helping users navigate vast amounts of information, offering personalized suggestions and effective explanations for these recommendations. While previous efforts have attempted to provide such explanations, evaluating their effectiveness across various scenarios remains a challenge.
arXiv:2607. 09502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Explaining machine-learning models is increasingly important for decision-making and consumer trust, yet it is widely believed to come at a cost: existing Explainable AI (XAI) methods suffer from a persistent accuracy-explainability trade-off.
By Pan Li
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
ReFIne is a training framework that augments large reasoning models with three trustworthiness properties: interpretability, faithfulness, and reliability. It combines supervised fine‑tuning with GRPO to produce structured, tag‑based reasoning traces, explicitly disclose decisive information, and provide self‑assessments of soundness and confidence. Applied to Qwen3 models, ReFIne improves interpretability by 44.0 %, faithfulness by 18.8 %, and reliability by 42.4 % on mathematical benchmarks.
By Chung-En Sun, Ge Yan, Akshay Kulkarni, Tsui-Wei Weng
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
arXiv:2607. 21143v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ambiguous user requests make clarification a sequential decision problem for conversational LLM assistants: they must decide whether to ask, what to ask, when to stop, and when to answer.
By Minh Ngoc Ta, My Anh Tran Nguyen, Duong D. Nguyen, Yuxia Wang, Preslav Nakov
arXiv:2606. 28615v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, where free-text explanations such as chain-of-thought and post-hoc rationales are used to justify model outputs.
By Nhi Nguyen, Shauli Ravfogel, Rajesh Ranganath
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
Reference-based text evaluation metrics, which are widely used to assess natural language generation systems, score a candidate response by comparing it with a reference response. The reliability of an evaluation metric is usually judged by its statistical correlation with human ratings.