The Recall Ceiling of LLM Recommendation Reranking

Some LLM-based recommendation rerankers are evaluated under an oracle protocol that guarantees the ground-truth item is present in the scored set, either by injecting it into the candidate list or by scoring it against sampled negatives. Across three primary Amazon datasets, we show that this protocol overestimates realistic NDCG@10 by 92--95%. The cause is a recall ceiling: realistic retrieval covers only 2--19% of relevant items at K=100 across eight datasets in three domains, imposing a deterministic upper bound on any closed-candidate reranker's top-k NDCG. Under leave-one-out evaluation, mathbbE[NDCG@k] ≤ Recall@|Wπ|, where Wπ is the reranker's candidate window. Under realistic retrieval, none of the tested optimisation strategies significantly improves over the collaborative-filtering baseline on our primary Amazon datasets. These strategies include prompt engineering, model scaling over a 168× parameter range, sequential models, supervised neural rerankers, LoRA fine-tuning, hybrid retrieval, score-aware prompting, and LLM+CF fusion. Text-aware retrieval increases recall on one dataset but does not improve end-to-end NDCG, while providing upstream CF scores mainly makes the LLM reproduce the CF order. We therefore propose the Recall-Aware Evaluation Protocol (RAEP): first classify the retrieval-recall regime, then evaluate reranking where the ceiling permits meaningful differentiation. In the low-recall regimes measured here, improving retrieval is more consequential than increasing reranker sophistication; this ordering need not hold in production systems with higher recall, richer features, or online feedback.