aiqbench analysis
This research introduces a novel method for optimizing conversational recommender systems by using entropy reduction as a reward signal to guide multi-turn interactions without requiring ground-truth labels. By fine-tuning large language models with this uncertainty-based metric, the approach significantly improves both recommendation accuracy and dialogue efficiency on standard datasets like INSPIRED and ReDial. The work advances the field of machine learning applications in conversational AI by addressing a key challenge in eliciting user preferences through strategic questioning rather than templated responses or proxy evaluations.
Ask to Be Sure: Informative Interactions for Confident Multi-Turn LLM Recommendation
arXiv:2608.15949v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their use as conversational recommender systems (CRS), demonstrating strong recommendation accuracy and natural dialogue. However, guiding multi-turn interactions to elicit user preferences effectively remains challenging. Existing approaches either use separate reinforcement learning agents with templated interactions or optimize for interactivity judged by another LLM, without measuring how much useful information is actually gained. We propose a new approach that quantifies the effectiveness of each interaction by the reduction in the assistant's uncertainty, measured via entropy over recommendations. We apply this entropy reduction as a reward---without relying on ground-truth recommendations, which are often unavailable in real-world scenarios---to fine-tune the LLM, enabling strategic interaction generation. Empirical results with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO) on the INSPIRED and ReDial datasets show that our method improves both recommendation quality and conversational efficiency.
Abstract:Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled their use as conversational recommender systems (CRS), demonstrating strong recommendation accuracy and natural dialogue. However, guiding multi-turn interactions to elicit user preferences effectively remains challenging. Existing approaches either use separate reinforcement learning agents with templated interactions or optimize for interactivity judged by another LLM, without measuring how much useful information is actually gained. We propose a new approach that quantifies the effectiveness of each interaction by the reduction in the assistant's uncertainty, measured via entropy over recommendations. We apply this entropy reduction as a reward---without relying on ground-truth recommendations, which are often unavailable in real-world scenarios---to fine-tune the LLM, enabling strategic interaction generation. Empirical results with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO) on the INSPIRED and ReDial datasets show that our method improves both recommendation quality and conversational efficiency.
Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2608.15949 [cs.IR]
(or arXiv:2608.15949v1 [cs.IR] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.15949 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
https://doi.org/10.1145/3799682.3839868 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources
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