Re2A: Situated Conversational Recommendation via Rubric-based Preference Reasoning and Alignment

Abstract:Real-world recommendation scenarios are commonly grounded in shared physical environments during user-recommender interactions. This motivates situated conversational recommendation (SCR), a complex task requiring recommender assistants to jointly reason over dialogue history, co-observed scenes, and in-scene item attributes. However, current approaches struggle with this setting due to two intertwined challenges: accurately understanding situated user preferences throughout the conversation and generating responses that simultaneously satisfy user needs and grounded situations. To this end, we propose Re2A, a framework that formulates SCR as a structured reason-then-align process. We introduce rubric-based preference reasoning, which uses automated rubrics to guide the model toward producing explicit preference states. Based on these states, we propose a preference-conditioned optimization to align response generation with dual objectives: user preference satisfaction and situation consistency. Extensive experiments on two SCR datasets demonstrate that Re2A consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, delivering more precise, context-aware conversational recommendations. Our code is available at this https URL.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.18249 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.18249v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.18249 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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