arXiv:2511. 07280v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Personalized recommendation systems shape much of user choice online, yet their targeted nature makes separating out the value of recommendation and the underlying goods challenging.
By Kevin Zielnicki, Guy Aridor, Aur\'elien Bibaut, Allen Tran, Winston Chou, Nathan Kallus
The study reproduces a prior work on recommender systems that use generated natural‑language user profiles to enhance transparency and user control. It confirms that the User Profile Recommendation (UPR) model performs competitively and that altering these profiles uniformly shifts predicted ratings without changing ranking order. Additional experiments include context ablation, multi‑seed stability, and mechanistic interpretability analysis with the nnsight framework.
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
arXiv:2607. 13418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommender systems operate as Black-Boxes, leaving users and regulators unable to steer their outputs toward specific intentions or audit their behavior.
By Jiwen Zhou, Xiang Liu, Mingming Li, Pengbo Mo, Jiao Dai, Honglei Lv, Jizhong Han, Songlin Hu
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: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