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
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. 18897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent-based recommender systems have gained significant attention for improving accuracy and interpretability by modeling the underlying motivations behind user behaviors.
By Jiangnan Xia, Xuansheng Wu, Yu Yang, Xin Wang, Ninghao Liu
arXiv:2602. 12612v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional methods for automating recommender system design, such as Neural Architecture Search (NAS), are often constrained by a fixed search space defined by human priors, limiting innovation to pre-defined operators.
By Sein Kim, Sangwu Park, Hongseok Kang, Wonjoong Kim, Jimin Seo, Yeonjun In, Kanghoon Yoon, Hyunsik Jeon, Chanyoung Park
The paper introduces a systematic benchmark for evaluating explainable methods that attribute temporal interactions in sequential recommendation systems. Using a dual-model masking metric, it assesses ten XAI techniques across CNN, Transformer, SASRec, and BERT4Rec backbones on KuaiRand and MovieLens datasets, revealing that gradient-based methods like GradientSHAP and Integrated Gradients are the most faithful and robust. It also finds that raw attention weights are unreliable, while gradient-weighted attention works better on short sequences but degrades on longer horizons, and that faithful methods capture genuine task structure rather than recency or popularity bias.
By Akash Pandey, Kanisha Shah, Addrish Roy, Dwipam Katariya, Hongyangyang Shi, Amanda Ding, Kalanand Mishra, Pranab Mohanty
Re2A is a new framework for situated conversational recommendation that models user interactions within shared physical environments. It introduces rubric-based preference reasoning to explicitly capture user preferences from dialogue history and scene context, and a preference-conditioned optimization to align generated responses with both user satisfaction and situational consistency. Experiments on two SCR datasets show that Re2A outperforms existing methods, providing more precise and context-aware recommendations.
By Dongding Lin, Jian Wang, Xiaoyan Zhao, Wenjie Li