Agentic recommender systems increasingly employ large language model-based UserAgents to evaluate candidate items through simulated feedback before recommendations are delivered. However, existing UserAgents typically reason in isolation based on limited personal histories, which may lead to perspective narrowing: the agent evaluates candidates from a local and incomplete view, overlooks relevant preference facets, and consequently produces inaccurate judgments. A natural way to alleviate this problem is to introduce other users as advisor agents, whose diverse histories provide complementary evidence that helps the target user reconsider overlooked preference signals. Nevertheless, a generic user-advisor communication process is insufficient, as different user decision states require different forms of external advice. Based on this insight, we propose AgentCom, a personalized communication skill framework for agentic recommender systems. AgentCom organizes reusable communication skills into a shared why--what--how--who skill bank: why identifies the decision deficiency that necessitates communication, what specifies the information task, how determines the advisor interaction protocol, and who retrieves advisors capable of executing that protocol. To make the shared skill bank personalized at use time and adaptive over time, AgentCom introduces two complementary mechanisms: personalized skill routing and failure-driven skill evolution. Personalized skill routing constructs a communication path by sequentially selecting suitable skills for each user and recommendation context. Failure-driven skill evolution learns from unsuccessful communication cases and enriches the shared bank with reusable skills that address previously uncovered communication needs. Experiments show that AgentCom consistently improves recommendation performance across traditional, social, and agentic recommenders.
Zongwei Wang, Min Gao, Guang-Yu Hu et al.· 0 citations
Test-time adaptation has emerged as a lightweight alternative to costly post-training for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. Predictive entropy provides a model-derived signal for such adaptation, guiding models toward higher-confidence reasoning states without external verifiers or reward models. However, higher confidence does not necessarily imply correctness, as LLMs may remain highly confident along incorrect reasoning trajectories. We observe that high-confidence reasoning is more likely to be correct when confidence remains stable under local perturbations. Based on this observation, we propose Test-Time Adaptation via Stability-Aware Confidence Optimization (TASCO), a framework that incorporates local stability into confidence-based test-time adaptation while keeping the LLM frozen. TASCO operationalizes local stability by optimizing a lightweight task-level prefix under two alternative perturbation strategies: Random Perturbation promotes distributional stability across trajectories induced by nearby perturbed prefixes, whereas Sharpness-Aware Perturbation targets worst-case local sensitivity. Experiments demonstrate that TASCO improves reasoning accuracy and token efficiency across diverse LLMs and reasoning benchmarks, while behavioral analyses show that it maintains stable confidence under local perturbations without prematurely concentrating the model's predictive distribution.
Bin-Cheng Gu, Min Gao, Zongwei Wang et al.· 0 citations
Semantic ID-based generative recommendation predicts an item by generating a short sequence of semantic ID tokens, where each token is produced autoregressively. Latent reasoning has recently been introduced to improve this process through additional hidden-state computation before each token decision. This raises a practical question: when one item is represented by a sequence of semantic ID tokens, should each token receive the same fixed number of latent refinement steps, or should these steps be allocated more effectively across positions? We study this question through position-wise information-gain (IG), which measures how much each semantic ID position reduces the uncertainty of the target item. We observe that earlier semantic ID positions usually provide higher information-gain, while later positions contribute less additional information. We further analyze that applying more refinement to high-IG positions tends to bring larger expected benefits. Based on this observation, we propose IBA, an Information-Gain Budget Allocation framework for semantic ID-based generative recommendation. IBA treats latent refinement steps as a limited computational resource and learns how to allocate them across semantic ID positions, assigning more refinement to informative positions and less to positions with smaller contribution. Experiments on multiple public datasets show that IBA consistently improves strong generative recommendation baselines and achieves a better accuracy--computation trade-off than fixed or poorly matched step allocations.
Shangxin Yang, Min Gao, Zongwei Wang et al.· 0 citations
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