Tunable LLM-based Proactive Recommendation Agent

Mingze Wang, Chongming Gao, Wenjie Wang, Yangyang Li, Fuli Feng


Abstract
Recommender systems are indispensable on various digital platforms. However, traditional methods often reinforce existing user interests, which leads to echo chambers and limits diversity. Proactive Recommendation Systems (PRS) aim to address this issue by cultivating users’ latent interests through multi-step recommendations. Despite advancements, challenges persist particularly in optimizing long-term rewards and adapting to real-time user feedback. In this study, we propose an LLM-based Actor-Critic Agent framework to enhance PRS. This framework utilizes the LLM-based agent to adjust recommendations in real time based on feedback and employs agent-tuning methods to optimize long-term rewards using three proposed reward functions. Extensive experiments validate the significant superiority of this framework over existing methods by optimizing long-term rewards and dynamically evolving with user feedback.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.944
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
19262–19276
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.944/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mingze Wang, Chongming Gao, Wenjie Wang, Yangyang Li, and Fuli Feng. 2025. Tunable LLM-based Proactive Recommendation Agent. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 19262–19276, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tunable LLM-based Proactive Recommendation Agent (Wang et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.944.pdf