# Thought-Augmented Planning for LLM-Powered Interactive Recommender Agent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23485 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23485/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in LLM reasoning for recommendation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 20 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [LLM reasoning for recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/llm-reasoning-for-recommendation/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Agentic recommender systems](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agentic-recommender-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04091/) (2023)
- [Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02716/) (2024)
- [Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16505/) (2023)
- [Buffer of Thoughts: Thought-Augmented Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04271/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models Know Your Contextual Search Intent: A Prompting Framework for Conversational Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06573/) (2023)
- [KnowAgent: Knowledge-Augmented Planning for LLM-Based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03101/) (2024)
- [A Multi-Agent Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01135/) (2024)
- [A Large Language Model Enhanced Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06212/) (2023)
- [ConvFiT: Conversational Fine-Tuning of Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10126/) (2021)
- [User Intent Recognition and Satisfaction with Large Language Models: A User Study with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02136/) (2024)
- [RAPID: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Long Text Generation with Writing Planning and Information Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00751/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models Meet Open-World Intent Discovery and Recognition: An Evaluation of ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10176/) (2023)
- [Scaling New Frontiers: Insights into Large Recommendation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00714/) (2024)
- [TD3: Tucker Decomposition Based Dataset Distillation Method for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02854/) (2025)
- [Generative Large Recommendation Models: Emerging Trends in LLMs for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13783/) (2025)
- [Incorporating External Knowledge and Goal Guidance for LLM-based Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01868/) (2024)
- [Prompting is not Enough: Exploring Knowledge Integration and Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19660/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [CoSteer: Collaborative Decoding-Time Personalization via Local Delta Steering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04756/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Collaborative Filtering: Orchestrating Users and Items for Agentic Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18413/) (2025)
- [SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03934/) (2025)
- [Why Thinking Hurts: Diagnosing and Rectifying Linguistic Inertia in Large Language Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16587/) (2026)
- [SpecSteer: Synergizing Local Context and Global Reasoning for Efficient Personalized Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16219/) (2026)
- [EXACT: Explicit Attribute-Guided Decoding-Time Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17695/) (2026)
- [SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07837/) (2026)
- [Learning from Emptiness: De-biasing Listwise Rerankers with Content-Agnostic Probability Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10150/) (2026)
- [RecRM-Bench: Benchmarking Multidimensional Reward Modeling for Agentic Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11874/) (2026)
- [Autonomous Information Seeking: A Roadmap for Agentic Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04433/) (2026)
- [Efficient Personalized Reranking with Semi-Autoregressive Generation and Online Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07107/) (2026)
- [IE as Cache: Information Extraction Enhanced Agentic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14930/) (2026)
- [AsymSpec: Context-Asymmetric Speculative Decoding for Agentic LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26004/) (2026)
- [Generative Data Transformation: From Mixed to Unified Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22743/) (2026)
- [Rethinking the Necessity of Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation through the Lens of Adaptive Listwise Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15621/) (2026)
- [Attacking and Defending Multi-Agent Collaborative Filtering Systems Through Connectivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03272/) (2026)
- [AgentRecommender: LLM Agents Enable Customizable Recommender Systems on the User Side](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31166/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Interactive recommendation is a typical information-seeking task that allows users to interactively express their needs through natural language and obtain personalized recommendations. Large language model-powered (LLM-powered) agents have become a new paradigm in interactive recommendations, effectively capturing users' real-time needs and enhancing personalized experiences. However, due to limited planning and generalization capabilities, existing formulations of LLM-powered interactive recommender agents struggle to effectively address diverse and complex user intents, such as intuitive, unrefined, or occasionally ambiguous requests. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel thought-augmented interactive recommender agent system (TAIRA) that addresses complex user intents through distilled thought patterns. Specifically, TAIRA is designed as an LLM-powered multi-agent system featuring a manager agent that orchestrates recommendation tasks by decomposing user needs and planning subtasks, with its planning capacity strengthened through Thought Pattern Distillation (TPD), a thought-augmentation method that extracts high-level thoughts from the agent's and human experts' experiences. Moreover, we designed a set of user simulation schemes to generate personalized queries of different difficulties and evaluate the recommendations based on specific datasets. Through comprehensive experiments conducted across multiple datasets, TAIRA exhibits significantly enhanced performance compared to existing methods. Notably, TAIRA shows a greater advantage on more challenging tasks while generalizing effectively on novel tasks, further validating its superiority in managing complex user intents within interactive recommendation systems. The code is publicly available at:https://github.com/Alcein/TAIRA.