Agents as Knowledge Integrator and Utilizer in Multimodal Recommendation
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agentic recommender systems
Abstract (arXiv)
Online platforms increasingly rely on multimodal recommender systems to rank products, media, and other Web content. Existing methods usually inject visual and textual features into item representations or build homogeneous graphs from modality-level similarity, but the resulting signals can remain misaligned with the recommendation objective. We study this semantic gap from a knowledge-integration perspective: multimodal content should be interpreted together with user behavior before it is used to construct recommendation graphs or adjust rankings. We propose AgentMMRec, an agent-based multimodal recommendation framework with two coordinated roles. The Integrator Agent infers behavior- and multimodal-aware user preferences and item properties from training interactions and item content, then stores them in a reusable knowledge memory. The Utilizer Agent consumes this memory to refine modality-specific item-item graphs, construct behavior-aware homogeneous graphs, and rerank candidate lists under a frozen evaluation-time memory. This design differs from direct LLM feature augmentation and pure LLM reranking because the generated knowledge is first converted into graph structure and model representations before recommendation. Experiments on three Amazon multimodal recommendation datasets show that AgentMMRec consistently improves Recall and NDCG over recent multimodal baselines, remains effective under sparsity and item cold-start settings, and can transfer its constructed knowledge to existing backbones.
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 25 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2026.
Builds on
25 of 42 references.
References · 25
- 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 37,240
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- 2023TALLRec: An Effective and Efficient Tuning Framework to Align Large Language Model with Recommendationcited by 337
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13 more
- 2023LGMRec: Local and Global Graph Learning for Multimodal Recommendationcited by 38
- 2023Multi-View Graph Convolutional Network for Multimedia Recommendationcited by 32
- 2024DiffMM: Multi-Modal Diffusion Model for Recommendationcited by 22
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- 2025MLLMRec: A Preference Reasoning Paradigm with Graph Refinement for Multimodal Recommendationcited by 3
- 2024BeFA: A General Behavior-driven Feature Adapter for Multimedia Recommendationcited by 1
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- 2026Seeing and Reflecting: Multimodal Memory-Enhanced Agent Collaboration for Recommendation
- 2025Do Recommender Systems Really Leverage Multimodal Content? A Comprehensive Analysis on Multimodal Representations for Recommendation
- 2026ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation
- 2026AdaM-Rec: Adaptive Modality Routing for Multimodal Recommendation ↗
- 2025Towards Agentic Recommender Systems in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models
- 2026ReMem: Rethinking Perception and Memory in Long-Context Recommendation Agents
- 2026RecoReward: Recommender-Guided Multimodal Description Generation for Recommendation
- 2026RecGOAT: Graph Optimal Adaptive Transport for LLM-Enhanced Multimodal Recommendation with Dual Semantic Alignment