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On Generative Agents in Recommendation

Published: 11 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Recommender systems are the cornerstone of today's information dissemination, yet a disconnect between offline metrics and online performance greatly hinders their development. Addressing this challenge, we envision a recommendation simulator, capitalizing on recent breakthroughs in human-level intelligence exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs). We propose Agent4Rec, a user simulator in recommendation, leveraging LLM-empowered generative agents equipped with user profile, memory, and actions modules specifically tailored for the recommender system. In particular, these agents' profile modules are initialized using real-world datasets (e.g., MovieLens, Steam, Amazon-Book), capturing users' unique tastes and social traits; memory modules log both factual and emotional memories and are integrated with an emotion-driven reflection mechanism; action modules support a wide variety of behaviors, spanning both taste-driven and emotion-driven actions. Each agent interacts with personalized recommender models in a page-by-page manner, relying on a pre-implemented collaborative filtering-based recommendation algorithm. We delve into both the capabilities and limitations of Agent4Rec, aiming to explore an essential research question: "To what extent can LLM-empowered generative agents faithfully simulate the behavior of real, autonomous humans in recommender systems?" Extensive and multi-faceted evaluations of Agent4Rec highlight both the alignment and deviation between agents and user-personalized preferences. Beyond mere performance comparison, we explore insightful experiments, such as emulating the filter bubble effect and discovering the underlying causal relationships in recommendation tasks.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGIR '24: Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
July 2024
3164 pages
ISBN:9798400704314
DOI:10.1145/3626772
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Published: 11 July 2024

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  1. generative agents
  2. large language model
  3. recommender system simulation

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