Jingsen Zhang
2025
Expectation Confirmation Preference Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversational Recommendation Agent
Xueyang Feng
|
Jingsen Zhang
|
Jiakai Tang
|
Wei Li
|
Guohao Cai
|
Xu Chen
|
Quanyu Dai
|
Yue Zhu
|
Zhenhua Dong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). However, these agents often generate short-sighted responses that fail to sustain user guidance and meet expectations. Although preference optimization has proven effective in aligning LLMs with user expectations, it remains costly and performs poorly in multi-turn dialogue. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multi-turn preference optimization (MTPO) paradigm **ECPO**, which leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turn dialogues, uncovering the underlying causes of dissatisfaction. These causes can be utilized to support targeted optimization of unsatisfactory responses, thereby achieving turn-level preference optimization. ECPO eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. To support ECPO, we also introduce an LLM-based user simulator, **AILO**, to simulate user feedback and expectation confirmation during conversational recommendations. Experimental results show that ECPO significantly enhances CRA’s interaction capabilities, offering notable improvements in both efficiency and effectiveness over existing MTPO methods.
Enhancing Recommendation Explanations through User-Centric Refinement
Jingsen Zhang
|
Zihang Tian
|
Xueyang Feng
|
Xu Chen
|
Chong Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Generating natural language explanations for recommendations has become increasingly important in recommender systems. Traditional approaches typically treat user reviews as ground truth for explanations and focus on improving review prediction accuracy by designing various model architectures. However, due to limitations in data scale and model capability, these explanations often fail to meet key user-centric aspects such as factuality, personalization, and sentiment coherence, significantly reducing their overall helpfulness to users.In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that refines initial explanations generated by existing explainable recommender models during the inference stage to enhance their quality in multiple aspects. Specifically, we introduce a multi-agent collaborative refinement framework based on large language models. To ensure alignment between the refinement process and user demands, we employ a plan-then-refine pattern to perform targeted modifications. To enable continuous improvements, we design a hierarchical reflection mechanism that provides feedback to the refinement process from both strategic and content perspectives. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
Search
Fix author
Co-authors
- Xu Chen (陈旭) 2
- Xueyang Feng 2
- Guohao Cai 1
- Chong Chen 1
- Quanyu Dai 1
- show all...