# Shape Your Feed: An LLM-based Agentic System for Conversational Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06632 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06632/

## 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 22 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2026.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Wide & Deep Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07792/) (2016)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19860/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning Recommendation Model for Personalization and Recommendation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00091/) (2019)
- [Recommender Systems in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02046/) (2023)
- [LLMRec: Large Language Models with Graph Augmentation for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00423/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00646/) (2020)
- [Improving Conversational Recommender Systems via Knowledge Graph based Semantic Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04032/) (2020)
- [Advances and Challenges in Conversational Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09459/) (2021)
- [Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05391/) (2019)
- [Neural Path Hunter: Reducing Hallucination in Dialogue Systems via Path Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08455/) (2021)
- [Recent Neural Methods on Slot Filling and Intent Classification for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00564/) (2020)
- [Bayesian Teaching Enables Probabilistic Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17523/) (2025)
- [A Large Language Model Enhanced Conversational Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06212/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Conversational Recommendation with Prompt-based Semi-Structured Natural Language State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00033/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Retrieval for Large Language Model-based Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14137/) (2025)
- [Generating Usage-related Questions for Preference Elicitation in Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13463/) (2021)
- [Explicit Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00783/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Industrial recommendation systems predominantly adopt a passive ranking paradigm that infers user preferences from implicit behavioral signals (e.g., clicks, dwell time) rather than explicit, natural language inputs. As a result, users experience a persistent discrepancy between their explicit interests and what passive behavioral algorithms deliver, limiting their ability to express nuanced preferences or steer their feed in real time. To address this growing gap between how recommendations are optimized and how users wish to articulate their interests, we present Shape Your Feed (SYF), an LLM-based agentic recommendation framework that enables real-time, multimodal co-curation of content. SYF employs a three-tier architecture: (i) a Perception Flow that captures fine-grained user intent from text prompts, voice commands, and UI interactions; (ii) a Serving Flow that performs real-time agentic re-ranking and pruning of candidate items, grounded in a persistent Semantic Profile encoding evolving user preferences; and (iii) a Self-Evolution Flow that aligns system behavior with human judgments via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and an LLM-as-a-Judge ensemble. Offline evaluations show that SYF's alignment scoring module achieves 98.85% accuracy, substantially improving over strong few-shot baselines. Large-scale online A/B experiments on production traffic further demonstrate that SYF improves feed relevance and user sentiment, indicating a practical and scalable path toward interactive, user-steerable recommendation in industrial settings.
