# Incorporating External Knowledge and Goal Guidance for LLM-based Conversational Recommender Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01868 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01868/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09645/) (2023)
- [GPT4Tools: Teaching Large Language Model to Use Tools via Self-instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18752/) (2023)
- [Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08553/) (2020)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [Uncovering ChatGPT's Capabilities in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02182/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00646/) (2020)
- [Seven Failure Points When Engineering a Retrieval Augmented Generation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05856/) (2024)
- [Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16505/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Conversational Recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10053/) (2023)
- [Advances and Challenges in Conversational Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09459/) (2021)
- [Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03954/) (2020)
- [Estimation-Action-Reflection: Towards Deep Interaction Between Conversational and Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09102/) (2020)
- [Towards Topic-Guided Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04125/) (2020)
- [INSPIRED: Toward Sociable Recommendation Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14306/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models are Competitive Near Cold-start Recommenders for Language- and Item-based Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14225/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems via User Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08732/) (2020)
- [DuRecDial 2.0: A Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08877/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Enhanced Pretrained Language Models: A Compreshensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08455/) (2021)
- [A Unified Multi-task Learning Framework for Multi-goal Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06923/) (2022)
- [A Large Language Model Enhanced Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06212/) (2023)
- [Variational Reasoning over Incomplete Knowledge Graphs for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.11868/) (2022)
- [Evaluating ChatGPT as a Recommender System: A Rigorous Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03613/) (2023)
- [Conversational Recommender System and Large Language Model Are Made for Each Other in E-commerce Pre-sales Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14626/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Large language models for artificial general intelligence (AGI): A survey of foundational principles and approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03151/) (2025)
- [Thought-Augmented Planning for LLM-Powered Interactive Recommender Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23485/) (2025)
- [The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14195/) (2024)
- [Beyond Persuasion: Towards Conversational Recommender System with Credible Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14399/) (2024)
- [TalkPlayData 2: An Agentic Synthetic Data Pipeline for Multimodal Conversational Music Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09685/) (2025)
- [Personalized Recommendation Systems using Multimodal, Autonomous, Multi Agent Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19855/) (2024)
- [Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24251/) (2025)
- [PaperFlow: Profiling, Recommending, and Adapting Across Daily Paper Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07454/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper aims to efficiently enable large language models (LLMs) to use external knowledge and goal guidance in conversational recommender system (CRS) tasks. Advanced LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) are limited in domain-specific CRS tasks for 1) generating grounded responses with recommendation-oriented knowledge, or 2) proactively leading the conversations through different dialogue goals. In this work, we first analyze those limitations through a comprehensive evaluation, showing the necessity of external knowledge and goal guidance which contribute significantly to the recommendation accuracy and language quality. In light of this finding, we propose a novel ChatCRS framework to decompose the complex CRS task into several sub-tasks through the implementation of 1) a knowledge retrieval agent using a tool-augmented approach to reason over external Knowledge Bases and 2) a goal-planning agent for dialogue goal prediction. Experimental results on two multi-goal CRS datasets reveal that ChatCRS sets new state-of-the-art benchmarks, improving language quality of informativeness by 17% and proactivity by 27%, and achieving a tenfold enhancement in recommendation accuracy.