Self-EvolveRec: Self-Evolving Recommender Systems with LLM-based Directional Feedback

2026-02-13

Technology Category

Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based SearchCognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent ArchitecturesData Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval

Application Category

User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Large Language Models (LLM) for user modeling and recommendationSearch and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metricsEconomics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Architectures and workflows that use LLMs for crowd work

Abstract

Traditional methods for automating recommender system design, such as Neural Architecture Search (NAS), are often constrained by a fixed search space defined by human priors, limiting innovation to pre-defined operators. While recent LLM-driven code evolution frameworks shift fixed search space target to open-ended program spaces, they primarily rely on scalar metrics (e.g., NDCG, Hit Ratio) that fail to provide qualitative insights into model failures or directional guidance for improvement. To address this, we propose Self-EvolveRec, a novel framework that establishes a directional feedback loop by integrating a User Simulator for qualitative critiques and a Model Diagnosis Tool for quantitative internal verification. Furthermore, we introduce a Diagnosis Tool - Model Co-Evolution strategy to ensure that evaluation criteria dynamically adapt as the recommendation architecture evolves. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Self-EvolveRec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art NAS and LLM-driven code evolution baselines in both recommendation performance and user satisfaction. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sein-Kim/self_evolverec.

Problem

• Recommender Systems
• Neural Architecture Search
• LLM-based Code Evolution
• Directional Feedback
• User Simulation

Innovation

• Self-Evolving Recommender Systems
• LLM-based Code Evolution
• Directional Feedback
• User Simulator
• Model Diagnosis Co-Evolution