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AgentCF: Collaborative Learning with Autonomous Language Agents for Recommender Systems

Published: 13 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Recently, there has been an emergence of employing LLM-powered agents as believable human proxies, based on their remarkable decision-making capability. However, existing studies mainly focus on simulating human dialogue. Human non-verbal behaviors, such as item clicking in recommender systems, although implicitly exhibiting user preferences and could enhance the modeling of users, have not been deeply explored. The main reasons lie in the gap between language modeling and behavior modeling, as well as the incomprehension of LLMs about user-item relations.
To address this issue, we propose AgentCF for simulating user-item interactions in recommender systems through agent-based collaborative filtering. We creatively consider not only users but also items as agents, and develop a collaborative learning approach that optimizes both kinds of agents together. Specifically, at each time step, we first prompt the user and item agents to interact autonomously. Then, based on the disparities between the agents' decisions and real-world interaction records, user and item agents are prompted to reflect on and adjust the misleading simulations collaboratively, thereby modeling their two-sided relations. The optimized agents can also propagate their preferences to other agents in subsequent interactions, implicitly capturing the collaborative filtering idea. Overall, the optimized agents exhibit diverse interaction behaviors within our framework, including user-item, user-user, item-item, and collective interactions. The results show that these agents can demonstrate personalized behaviors akin to those of real-world individuals, sparking the development of next-generation user behavior simulation.

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  1. AgentCF: Collaborative Learning with Autonomous Language Agents for Recommender Systems

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WWW '24: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024
    May 2024
    4826 pages
    ISBN:9798400701719
    DOI:10.1145/3589334
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    Published: 13 May 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. agents
    2. collaborative learning
    3. large language models

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    May 13 - 17, 2024
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    • (2025)CD-LLMCARS: Cross Domain Fine-Tuned Large Language Model for Context-Aware Recommender SystemsIEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society10.1109/OJCS.2024.35092216(49-59)Online publication date: 2025
    • (2025)Let long-term interests talk: An disentangled learning model for recommendation based on short-term interests generationInformation Processing & Management10.1016/j.ipm.2024.10399762:2(103997)Online publication date: Mar-2025
    • (2024)Spontaneous Emergence of Agent Individuality Through Social Interactions in Large Language Model-Based CommunitiesEntropy10.3390/e2612109226:12(1092)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2024
    • (2024)Thoroughly Modeling Multi-domain Pre-trained Recommendation as LanguageACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/3708883Online publication date: 19-Dec-2024
    • (2024)How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A SurveyACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/3678004Online publication date: 13-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Large Language Model Powered Agents for Information RetrievalProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3661375(2989-2992)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Large Language Model Powered Agents in the WebCompanion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589335.3641240(1242-1245)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2024)Visual Summary Thought of Large Vision-Language Models for Multimodal Recommendation2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)10.1109/BigData62323.2024.10825030(456-461)Online publication date: 15-Dec-2024
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    • (2024)A survey on large language models for recommendationWorld Wide Web10.1007/s11280-024-01291-227:5Online publication date: 22-Aug-2024
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