mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Do Recommendation Algorithms Work When Users Are LLM Agents? A Case Study on Moltbook

arXiv 2606.29762 ↗First posted 29 Jun 2026cs.IRcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly populating web platforms, raising a fundamental question for recommender systems: do algorithms designed for human users still work when users are LLM agents that may not have well-defined content consumption preferences? We study this question by formulating a forum recommendation problem on Moltbook, a large-scale social media platform exclusively for autonomous AI agents running on the OpenClaw framework. We evaluate nine recommendation methods spanning simple heuristic rules, matrix factorization, itemand user-based collaborative filtering, graph-based, and sequential models on the task of predicting which forums an agent will engage with next. We find that simple popularity-based rules or item-side collaborative filtering leveraging the platform and item structural information outperform techniques that explicitly learn a user representation. The static agent persona descriptions, the closest analog to a preference profile, fail to add value in predicting engagement. These results suggest that, on Moltbook, recommendation depends more on platform- and item-level structural signals than on user-specific personalization. We present multiple lines of empirical evidence that the observed content consumption patterns on Moltbook differ from well-established findings on human recommendation datasets, providing a new angle for studying agent societies and designing robust recommendation algorithms as agents increasingly populate the web.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agentic recommender systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 33 of its 77 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2026.

Builds on

33 of 77 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Agentic Recommender System with Hierarchical Belief-State Memory14 May
  2. 2026AMEM4Rec: Leveraging Cross-User Similarity for Memory Evolution in Agentic LLM Recommenders9 Feb
  3. 2026MemRec: Collaborative Memory-Augmented Agentic Recommender System13 Jan
  4. 2025RecoWorld: Building Simulated Environments for Agentic Recommender Systems12 Sep

Other references · 29

  1. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
  2. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  3. 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,568
  4. 2023A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agentscited by 2,242
  5. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,439
  6. 2018Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendationcited by 1,184
  7. 2020LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendationcited by 1,139
  8. 2017Neural Collaborative Filteringcited by 1,111
  9. 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agentscited by 1,063
  10. 2019BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformercited by 964
  11. 2015Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutescited by 706
  12. 2019Neural Graph Collaborative Filteringcited by 661
17 more
  1. 2023TALLRec: An Effective and Efficient Tuning Framework to Align Large Language Model with Recommendationcited by 337
  2. 2018Variational Autoencoders for Collaborative Filteringcited by 310
  3. 2023Chat-REC: Towards Interactive and Explainable LLMs-Augmented Recommender Systemcited by 242
  4. 2025OneRec: Unifying Retrieve and Rank with Generative Recommender and Iterative Preference Alignmentcited by 173
  5. 2024Agent AI: Surveying the Horizons of Multimodal Interactioncited by 170
  6. 2024Emergent social conventions and collective bias in LLM populationscited by 123
  7. 2024From Individual to Society: A Survey on Social Simulation Driven by Large Language Model-based Agentscited by 82
  8. 2026Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineeringcited by 74
  9. 2019Scalable and Generalizable Social Bot Detection through Data Selectioncited by 59
  10. 2020A Decade of Social Bot Detectioncited by 48
  11. 2015Metadata Embeddings for User and Item Cold-start Recommendationscited by 29
  12. 2013Using Temporal Data for Making Recommendationscited by 20
  13. 2026Agents in the Wild: Safety, Society, and the Illusion of Sociality on Moltbookcited by 10
  14. 2026Let There Be Claws: An Early Social Network Analysis of AI Agents on Moltbookcited by 7
  15. 2025A Systematic Study of Time Limit Exceeded Errors in Online Programming Assignmentscited by 3
  16. 2026The Moltbook Observatory Archive: an incremental dataset of agent-only social network activitycited by 3
  17. 2026AI-Gram: When Visual Agents Interact in a Social Networkcited by 1

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