mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Towards Personalized Conversational Sales Agents: Contextual User Profiling for Strategic Action

arXiv 2504.08754 ↗First posted 28 Mar 2025cs.IR cs.AIcited by 6

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agentic recommender systems

Abstract (arXiv)

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs)aim to engage users in dialogue to provide tailored recommendations. While traditional CRSs focus on eliciting preferences and retrieving items, real-world e-commerce interactions involve more complex decision-making, where users consider multiple factors beyond simple attributes. To capture this complexity, we introduce Conversational Sales (CSALES), a novel task that integrates preference elicitation, recommendation, and persuasion within a unified conversational framework. To support realistic and systematic evaluation, we present CSUSER, an evaluation protocol with LLM-based user simulator grounded in real-world behavioral data by modeling fine-grained user profiles for personalized interaction. We also propose CSI, a conversational sales agent that proactively infers contextual user profiles and strategically selects actions through conversation. Comprehensive experiments show that CSI significantly improves both recommendation success and persuasive effectiveness across diverse user profiles.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agentic recommender systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 42 of its 62 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2025.

Builds on

42 of 62 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024A Multi-Agent Conversational Recommender System2 Feb

Other references · 41

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,132
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  3. 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
  4. 2021Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Modelscited by 462
  5. 2024Bridging Language and Items for Retrieval and Recommendation: Benchmarking LLMs as Semantic Encoderscited by 213
  6. 2019Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Goodcited by 207
  7. 2023Improving Language Model Negotiation with Self-Play and In-Context Learning from AI Feedbackcited by 202
  8. 2018Towards Deep Conversational Recommendationscited by 174
  9. 2024A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systemscited by 170
  10. 2020A Survey on Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 142
  11. 2019Asking Clarifying Questions in Open-Domain Information-Seeking Conversationscited by 136
  12. 2023Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Conversational Recommenderscited by 126
29 more
  1. 2018Conversational Recommender Systemcited by 115
  2. 2020Estimation-Action-Reflection: Towards Deep Interaction Between Conversational and Recommender Systemscited by 98
  3. 2019RecSim: A Configurable Simulation Platform for Recommender Systemscited by 91
  4. 2019Proactive Human-Machine Conversation with Explicit Conversation Goalscited by 87
  5. 2022Towards Unified Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge-Enhanced Prompt Learningcited by 85
  6. 2023Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agentscited by 76
  7. 2023A Survey on Proactive Dialogue Systems: Problems, Methods, and Prospectscited by 66
  8. 2018RecoGym: A Reinforcement Learning Environment for the problem of Product Recommendation in Online Advertisingcited by 65
  9. 2023Boosting Theory-of-Mind Performance in Large Language Models via Promptingcited by 64
  10. 2024Large Language Models Empowered Personalized Web Agentscited by 64
  11. 2023Leveraging Large Language Models in Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 63
  12. 2023EcomGPT: Instruction-tuning Large Language Models with Chain-of-Task Tasks for E-commercecited by 48
  13. 2020Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems via User Simulationcited by 46
  14. 2022PACIFIC: Towards Proactive Conversational Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data in Financecited by 45
  15. 2024LLM-Powered User Simulator for Recommender Systemcited by 38
  16. 2020Improving Dialog Systems for Negotiation with Personality Modelingcited by 37
  17. 2023A Large Language Model Enhanced Conversational Recommender Systemcited by 31
  18. 2023A Survey on Asking Clarification Questions Datasets in Conversational Systemscited by 28
  19. 2023Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curationcited by 23
  20. 2020User Memory Reasoning for Conversational Recommendationcited by 19
  21. 2023Conversational Recommender System and Large Language Model Are Made for Each Other in E-commerce Pre-sales Dialoguecited by 15
  22. 2024Pearl: A Review-driven Persona-Knowledge Grounded Conversational Recommendation Datasetcited by 15
  23. 2023Dialogue Planning via Brownian Bridge Stochastic Process for Goal-directed Proactive Dialoguecited by 14
  24. 2024SUBER: An RL Environment with Simulated Human Behavior for Recommender Systemscited by 11
  25. 2024ProductAgent: Benchmarking Conversational Product Search Agent with Asking Clarification Questionscited by 10
  26. 2024Concept -- An Evaluation Protocol on Conversational Recommender Systems with System-centric and User-centric Factorscited by 9
  27. 2024Injecting Salesperson's Dialogue Strategies in Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoningcited by 9
  28. 2024Beyond Retrieval: Generating Narratives in Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 8
  29. 2023Towards Asking Clarification Questions for Information Seeking on Task-Oriented Dialoguescited by 7

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 4.

6 papers.

  1. 2025A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agentcited by 26
  2. 2025RPM: Reasoning-Level Personalization for Black-Box Large Language Modelscited by 2
  3. 2026Think Thrice Before You Speak: Dual knowledge-enhanced Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Persuasive Agentscited by 2
  4. 2026Hypotheses-Guided Self Distillation for Continual Personalizationcited by 1
  5. 2026Decision-aware User Simulation Agent for Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systemscited by 0
  6. 2026RealWorldShop: Benchmarking and Improving Conversational Shopping Agents in Real-World E-commercecited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2023Salespeople vs SalesBot: Exploring the Role of Educational Value in Conversational Recommender Systems
  2. 2025Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems via Large Language Models: A User-Centric Framework
  3. 2025RecUserSim: A Realistic and Diverse User Simulator for Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems
  4. 2026When and How to Ask: Dynamic Preference Elicitation Strategies for Conversational Recommendation ↗
  5. 2026MACS: A Hybrid Multi-Agent Framework for Reliable Conversational E-Commerce Recommendation
  6. 2025From Simulation to Strategy: Automating Personalized Interaction Planning for Conversational Agents
  7. 2025Optimizing Conversational Product Recommendation via Reinforcement Learning
  8. 2025Toward Safe and Human-Aligned Game Conversational Recommendation via Multi-Agent Decomposition