Recent advances in multimodal recommenders excel at feature fusion but remain opaque and inefficient decision-makers, lacking explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty. To address this, we introduce ReasonRec, a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline: Observe, via a pretrained Vision-Language Model (VLM) encoder; Deliberate, by formulating recommendation as chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning tasks and explicitly quantifying prediction uncertainty through an evidence-horizon-aware curriculum; and Act, through dynamic delegation of uncertain or challenging queries to lightweight classical recommendation models. Specifically, we propose a reasoning-aware visual instruction tuning strategy that systematically transforms diverse recommendation tasks into unified CoT prompts, enabling the VLM to explicitly articulate intermediate decision steps. Additionally, our evidence-horizon curriculum progressively enhances the reasoning complexity to better handle cold-start and long-tail user scenarios, significantly boosting model generalization. Furthermore, the uncertainty-guided delegation mechanism empowers the agent to assess its own confidence, strategically allocating computational resources to optimize both recommendation accuracy and inference efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on four standard recommendation tasks (sequential recommendation, direct recommendation, CTR prediction, and explanation generation) across five real-world datasets demonstrate that ReasonRec achieves over 30% relative improvement in key ranking metrics (e.g., HR@5, NDCG@5) compared to state-of-the-art multimodal recommenders. Crucially, ReasonRec substantially reduces inference latency by dynamically delegating up to 35% of queries to efficient sub-models without compromising accuracy. Extensive ablation studies further confirm that each proposed reasoning and planning mechanism individually contributes substantially to ReasonRec’s overall effectiveness. Collectively, our results illustrate a clear pathway towards interpretable, adaptive, and efficient multimodal recommendation through explicit reasoning and agentic design.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly adopted as judges for subjective assessment, yet absolute scoring remains brittle due to inconsistent scales and inherent preference biases. To bridge this gap, we propose S²AD (**Semantic-Anchored Scale-Agnostic Distillation**), a novel easy-to-hard framework that operationalizes subjective assessment as comparative analysis, conceptualizing the judge’s evolution from mimesis to metamorphosis. In Stage 1 (Mimesis), we introduce Dynamic Soft Positioning (DSP) to train the judge to compare a query against retrieved reference images, establishing a relative evaluation space that ensures consistent ordering under heterogeneous scales. In Stage 2 (Metamorphosis), this comparative capability is internalized via Language Buttons—discrete semantic levels serving as a retrieval-free internal reference. Optimized with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), S²AD achieves efficient, scale-steerable inference that adapts to diverse grading standards. Our framework reaches state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of internalized comparative priors for robust, rank-invariant, and scale-steerable evaluation. The code is available at: https://github.com/SpatialVision-Research/SSAD_ACL2026_Findings.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recommender systems for Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction requires a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. This paper introduces OptiRAG-Rec, a comprehensive framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. By leveraging Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) as efficient retrieval mechanisms, the framework significantly reduces data retrieval times while maintaining high model performance. Additionally, the multi-head early exit strategy dynamically terminates inference based on real-time predictive confidence assessments, enhancing responsiveness without sacrificing accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that OptiRAG-Rec reduces computation time while preserving the precision required for reliable recommendations, establishing a new benchmark for efficient and accurate LLM deployment in recommendation.