# SR-Agent: An Experience-Driven Agentic Framework for Post-Ranking Strategy Refinement in E-Commerce Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17719 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17719/

## 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 24 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Judging the Judges: A Systematic Study of Position Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07791/) (2024)
- [Top-K Off-Policy Correction for a REINFORCE Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02353/) (2018)
- [Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16505/) (2023)
- [RecMind: Large Language Model Powered Agent For Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14296/) (2023)
- [AgentCF: Collaborative Learning with Autonomous Language Agents for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09233/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Session-based Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04864/) (2019)
- [On Generative Agents in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10108/) (2023)
- [A Survey on LLM-powered Agents for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10050/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models as Generative User Simulators for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09738/) (2024)
- [LLM-Powered User Simulator for Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16984/) (2024)
- [SimUSER: Simulating User Behavior with Large Language Models for Recommender System Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12722/) (2025)
- [Self-Evolving Recommendation System: End-To-End Autonomous Model Optimization With LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10226/) (2026)
- [RecUserSim: A Realistic and Diverse User Simulator for Evaluating Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22897/) (2025)
- [Self-EvolveRec: Self-Evolving Recommender Systems with LLM-based Directional Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12612/) (2026)
- [AgentX: Towards Agent-Driven Self-Iteration of Industrial Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26859/) (2026)
- [Determinantal Point Process Likelihoods for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11562/) (2022)
- [Beyond-Accuracy: A Review on Diversity, Serendipity and Fairness in Recommender Systems Based on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02294/) (2023)
- [Temporal-Aware User Behaviour Simulation with Large Language Models for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16895/) (2025)
- [StepFly: Agentic Troubleshooting Guide Automation for Incident Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10074/) (2025)
- [AgentRec: Next-Generation LLM-Powered Multi-Agent Collaborative Recommendation with Adaptive Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01609/) (2025)
- [Autonomous Information Seeking: A Roadmap for Agentic Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04433/) (2026)
- [MADREC: A Multi-Aspect Driven LLM Agent for Explainable and Adaptive Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13371/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

User experience is a first-class objective in industrial e-commerce recommender systems (RS). Post-ranking strategies, which govern diversity, similarity, and exposure over a ranked list, are widely deployed in industrial RS for their simplicity and low serving cost. However, as the online recommendation environment evolves continuously, these statically configured strategies gradually become stale, thereby degrading the user experience. Refining them typically relies on manual inspection, diagnosis, and updates, making it slow, costly, and difficult to scale or reuse. Although recent LLM-based agents (e.g., RecUserSim, SimUSER, and Self-EvolveRec) offer promising directions, none of them close the full loop of automated, self-evolving strategy refinement. To bridge this gap, we introduce SR-Agent, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first agentic framework deployed to refine post-ranking strategies in industrial RS. SR-Agent unifies three components: (i) a UserSim agent that applies inspection skills to surface user-perceived bad cases; (ii) an Analysis agent that consolidates recurring bad cases into structured, reusable diagnoses; and (iii) a constrained Strategy Refinement Harness that maps diagnoses to typed and bounded actions, gated by a four-stage reward pipeline with reversible rollback. Deployed on the Kuaishou e-commerce platform, SR-Agent continuously runs this refinement loop and, in a one-month online A/B test, increases order volume by 0.71%, browsing depth by 0.34%, and clicked-category diversity by 0.48%, while markedly shortening the refinement cycle and lowering operational cost.