RRCM: Ranking-Driven Retrieval over Collaborative and Meta Memories for LLM Recommendation
On the map: LLM reasoning → LLM reasoning for recommendation
Abstract (arXiv)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for next-generation recommender systems, offering strong semantic understanding and natural-language reasoning abilities. Despite recent progress, current LLM-based recommenders still face key challenges in constructing decision-relevant contexts from heterogeneous evidence. First, existing methods often rely on fixed context construction strategies: collaborative behavioral evidence and item-side metadata are typically incorporated through predefined prompts, static retrieval pipelines, or handcrafted injection mechanisms, making it difficult to determine what information is truly beneficial for each instance. Second, heterogeneous evidence introduces a severe context-efficiency bottleneck. Rich metadata and collaborative interaction records can quickly overwhelm the context window, while aggressive compression or heuristic filtering may discard fine-grained evidence critical for accurate recommendation. To address these challenges, we propose RRCM, a ranking-driven retrieval-and-reasoning framework over collaborative and metadata memories for LLM-based agentic recommendation. RRCM starts from a lightweight user-history context and learns whether to recommend directly, retrieve collaborative evidence, retrieve item metadata, or interleave both through reasoning. Both memories are represented in natural language and accessed through a unified retrieval interface, enabling flexible evidence acquisition without handcrafted CF injection or fixed retrieval rules. We optimize this memory-reading policy with an outcome-only ranking reward, instantiated using group relative policy optimization, so that retrieval decisions are directly driven by final top-k recommendation quality. Extensive experiments show that RRCM significantly outperforms traditional baselines and diverse LLM-based recommendation approaches.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in LLM reasoning for recommendation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.
Builds on
43 of 54 references.
Closest ancestors · 6
Same direction, newest first
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- 2025Reason4Rec: Deliberative User Preference Alignment of Large Language Models for Recommendation4 Feb
- 2024Leveraging LLM Reasoning Enhances Personalized Recommender Systems22 Jul
Other references · 37
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25 more
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