AgenticRec: A Recommendation-Oriented Agentic Framework with Progressive Tool-Integrated Reasoning Optimization
Organizations: Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
Abstract
Recommender agents built on Large Language Models offer a promising paradigm for personalized recommendation. However, existing agents typically suffer from a misalignment between their tool-integrated reasoning trajectories and recommendation feedback, limiting their ability to distinguish fine-grained user preferences. To address these challenges, we propose AgenticRec, an agentic recommendation framework that formulates recommendation as a tool-integrated reasoning process over a recommendation-oriented tool suite. Built upon this framework, we further develop a dedicated two-stage training paradigm tailored for recommender agents. In the first stage, we introduce Recommendation-Oriented Trajectory Activation, optimize the agentic recommendation ability under implicit feedback. In the second stage, Progressive Preference Refinement further refines the agent through bidirectional preference reasoning over self-bootstrapped hard pairs, progressively sharpening preference boundaries. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AgenticRec. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgenticRec-FB16.
Figures & tables
| Model | CDs | Instruments | Office | Games | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| H@1 | H@5 | N@5 | H@10 | N@10 | H@1 | H@5 | N@5 | H@10 | N@10 | H@1 | H@5 | N@5 | H@10 | N@10 | H@1 | H@5 | N@5 | H@10 | N@10 | |
| Conventional Sequential Recommenders | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Caser | 0.0488 | 0.2526 | 0.1487 | 0.5089 | 0.2307 | 0.1825 | 0.4644 | 0.3275 | 0.6384 | 0.3828 | 0.1771 | 0.4374 | 0.3139 | 0.5541 | 0.3511 | 0.1535 | 0.3953 | 0.2813 | 0.5220 | 0.3217 |
| GRU4Rec | 0.0512 | 0.2348 | 0.1403 | 0.4851 | 0.2202 | 0.1960 | 0.4534 | 0.3291 | 0.6446 | 0.3907 | 0.1642 | 0.4324 | 0.3054 | 0.5705 | 0.3490 | 0.1708 | 0.3781 | 0.2817 | 0.5239 | 0.3288 |
| SASRec | 0.0536 | 0.2348 | 0.1413 | 0.4660 | 0.2145 | 0.1813 | 0.4546 | 0.3238 | 0.6323 | 0.3807 | 0.1662 | 0.4270 | 0.3018 | 0.5863 | 0.3525 | 0.1535 | 0.3915 | 0.2762 | 0.5374 | 0.3234 |
| ReaRec | 0.0357 | 0.1871 | 0.1082 | 0.4576 | 0.1942 | 0.1507 | 0.3786 | 0.2633 | 0.6188 | 0.3400 | 0.1716 | 0.4265 | 0.3049 | 0.5551 | 0.3457 | 0.1459 | 0.3723 | 0.2298 | 0.5873 | 0.2987 |
| Data | Setting | Variant | H@1 | H@5 | N@5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDs | Frozen | R | 0.1907 | 0.4696 | 0.3303 |
| TIRR | 0.2331 | 0.5476 | 0.3955 | ||
| Trained | R | 0.2324 | 0.5399 | 0.3865 | |
| TIRR (RTA) | 0.2837 | 0.6162 | 0.4606 | ||
| TIRR (RTA+PPR) | 0.2992 | 0.6472 | 0.4795 | ||
| Instr. | Frozen | R | 0.1973 | 0.5613 | 0.3818 |
| Data | Avg. Latency (s) | Avg. Tool Time (s) |
|---|---|---|
| CDs | 16.233 | 0.010 |
| Games | 18.260 | 0.022 |
| Office | 20.678 | 0.019 |
| Instruments | 17.074 | 0.013 |
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Dataset | #Users | #Items | #Inters. | Sparsity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CDs | 5,437 | 8,785 | 13,826 | 99.71% |
| Instruments | 7,593 | 5,279 | 15,746 | 99.61% |
| Office | 27,130 | 11,511 | 47,333 | 99.85% |
| Games | 6,251 | 3,003 | 11,457 | 99.39% |
Recommender Systems
Recommender systems predict and rank items for people using interaction histories, content, context, and feedback.
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