arXiv AI By Guanrong Li, Haolin Yang, Xinyu Liu, Zhen Wu, Rui Xia, Xinyu Dai

Neutralizing Popularity Bias in LLM-based Recommendation via Counterfactual Reasoning Guidelines

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper introduces NPRec, a model‑agnostic framework that uses counterfactual reasoning to neutralize popularity bias in large language model–based recommender systems. By generating debiased textual guidelines that separate intrinsic user interests from popularity signals, NPRec injects these guidelines at inference time to guide the LLM’s generation without updating parameters. Experiments on three real‑world datasets show improved recommendation accuracy, explanation quality, and debiasing performance.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

Reasoning with Evidence, Not Merely Rationales: Verifiable Preference Proofs for LLM-Based Recommendation

The paper introduces PROVE-REC, a two‑pass framework that generates verifiable preference proofs for large language model (LLM) recommendation systems. In Pass A, the model condenses user interaction histories into a compact proof of positive and avoidance claims linked to specific evidence entries. Pass B then uses only this proof and its evidence to predict the next item, ensuring the recommendation follows the reasoning path. Verification steps compare masked evidence and removed claims to confirm grounding and influence, while a ranking‑preservation objective retains useful historical information. Experiments on diverse real‑world datasets show PROVE‑REC outperforms strong baselines by up to 7.45%, producing claims that are both better grounded and more influential to recommendation quality.

By Yu Hou, Nathaniel Kang, Pengkai Wang, Hua Li
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Learning Better Reasoning for Generative Recommendation with Semantic IDs

The paper introduces Evo-Rec, a three‑stage framework that improves generative recommendation by learning better reasoning traces for Semantic ID (SID) generation. It first aligns SIDs with textual and behavioral contexts, then selects candidate reasoning traces that improve ground‑truth item prediction, and finally refines the reasoning policy via reinforcement learning with catalog‑constrained generation and ranking‑aware feedback. Experiments on Amazon Review datasets show Evo‑Rec consistently outperforms existing discriminative, generative, and reasoning‑enhanced recommenders across all metrics.

By Mengdan Zhu, Yufan Zhao, Sophie Di, Yao Zhao, Tao Di, Yulan Yan, Sridhar Iyer, Liang Zhao
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

Learning Better Reasoning for Generative Recommendation with Semantic IDs

The paper introduces Evo-Rec, a three‑stage framework that improves generative recommendation by learning better reasoning traces for Semantic ID (SID) generation. First, it aligns SIDs with textual and behavioral contexts; second, it samples and selects reasoning traces that improve ground‑truth item prediction via supervised fine‑tuning; third, it refines the reasoning policy with reinforcement learning using catalog‑constrained generation and ranking‑aware feedback. Experiments on three Amazon Review datasets show Evo‑Rec consistently outperforms discriminative, generative, and other reasoning‑enhanced recommenders across all metrics.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

RPCBench: A Benchmark for Proactive Premise Critique in LLM-based Recommendation

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
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Ask to Be Sure: Informative Interactions for Confident Multi-Turn LLM Recommendation

arXiv:2608. 15949v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their use as conversational recommender systems (CRS), demonstrating strong recommendation accuracy and natural dialogue.

By Cedar Site Bai, Duanshun Li, Zhenyu Liao, Sheikh Sarwar, Huiyuan Chen, Yuan Chen, Changhe Yuan, Haiyang Zhang, Qilin Qi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 17

Reproducing Transparent and Scrutable Recommendations: Exploring Open-Weight Models via Natural-Language User Profiles

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.