iAgent: LLM Agent as a Shield between User and Recommender Systems
Keywords: Large Language Model; LLM-based Agents; Memory Mechanism
TL;DR: This paper designs individual instruction-aware agent to build a protective shield between user and recommender systems.
Abstract: Traditional recommender systems usually take the user-platform paradigm, where users are directly exposed under the control of the platform’s recommendation algorithms. However, the defect of recommendation algorithms may put users in very vulnerable positions under this paradigm. First, many sophisticated models are often designed with commercial objectives in mind, focusing on the platform’s
benefits, which may hinder their ability to protect and capture users’ true interests. Second, these models are typically optimized using data from all users, which may overlook individual user’s preferences. Due to these shortcomings, users may experience several disadvantages under the traditional user-platform direct exposure paradigm, such as lack of control over the recommender system, potential manipulation by the platform, echo chamber effects, or lack of personalization for less active users due to the dominance of active users during collaborative learning. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop a new paradigm to protect user interests and alleviate these issues. Recently, some researchers have introduced LLM agents to simulate user behaviors, these approaches primarily aim to optimize platform-side performance, leaving core issues in recommender systems unresolved. To address these limitations, we propose a new user-agent-platform paradigm, where agent serves as the protective shield between user and recommender system
that enables indirect exposure. To this end, we first construct four recommendation datasets, denoted as InstructRec, along with user instructions for each record. To understand user’s intention, we design an Instruction-aware Agent (iAgent) capable of using tools to acquire knowledge from external environments. Moreover, we introduce an Individual Instruction-aware Agent ( i$^2$Agent), which incorporates a dynamic memory mechanism to optimize from individual feedback. Results on four InstructRec datasets demonstrate that i2Agent consistently achieves an average improvement of 16.6% over SOTA baselines across ranking metrics. Moreover, i$^2$Agent mitigates echo chamber effects and effectively alleviates the model bias in disadvantaged users (less-active), serving as a shield between user and recommender systems.
Primary Area: other topics in machine learning (i.e., none of the above)
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Submission Number: 11450
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