Liang-Bo Ning
2026
ReRec: Reasoning-Augmented LLM-based Recommendation Assistant via Reinforcement Fine-tuning
Jiani Huang | Shijie Wang | Liang-Bo Ning | Wenqi Fan | Li Qing
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiani Huang | Shijie Wang | Liang-Bo Ning | Wenqi Fan | Li Qing
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
With the rise of LLMs, there is an increasing need for intelligent recommendation assistants that can handle complex queries and provide personalized, reasoning-driven recommendations. LLM-based recommenders show potential but face challenges in multi-step reasoning, underscoring the need for reasoning-augmented systems. To address this gap, we propose ReRec, a novel reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) framework designed to improve LLM reasoning in complex recommendation tasks. Our framework introduces three key components: (1) Dual-Graph Enhanced Reward Shaping, integrating recommendation metrics like NDCG@K with Query Alignment and Preference Alignment Scores to provide fine-grained reward signals for LLM optimization; (2) Reasoning-aware Advantage Estimation, which decomposes LLM outputs into reasoning segments and penalizes incorrect steps to enhance reasoning of recommendation; and (3) Online Curriculum Scheduler, dynamically assess query difficulty and organize training curriculum to ensure stable learning during RFT. Experiments demonstrate that ReRec outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and preserves core abilities like instruction-following and general knowledge. Our codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ReRec/.
When Efficiency Becomes a Vulnerability: Computational Cost Attacks on WebAgents
Liang-Bo Ning | Yuchen Zhu | Heqing Huang | Xin Wang | Yi Chang | Li Qing | Wenqi Fan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Liang-Bo Ning | Yuchen Zhu | Heqing Huang | Xin Wang | Yi Chang | Li Qing | Wenqi Fan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
WebAgents have demonstrated strong capabilities in autonomously completing complex web tasks, yet their computational efficiency vulnerabilities have received limited attention. Adversaries can inject malicious prompts into web pages, causing WebAgents to generate unnecessarily long reasoning processes and incur excessive computational cost, termed Computational Cost Attacks (CCA). In this paper, to systematically study this vulnerability under realistic black-box settings, we propose CostBomb, a generation-then-selection attack framework that leverages large language models to generate diverse adversarial prompts and a reinforcement learning–enhanced selector to identify the most effective perturbations. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world web benchmarks reveal that existing WebAgents are highly vulnerable to CCA, suffering substantial increases in computational cost without compromising successful task completion. Our findings highlight an overlooked dimension of WebAgent robustness and underscore the urgent need for efficiency-aware defenses.