Awakening Dormant Users: Modeling Intent Evolution via LLM-based Functional Role Reasoning for Generative Recommendation

Huishi Luo, Shuokai Li, Hanchen Yang, Zhongbo Sun, Haojie Ding, Boheng Zhang, Zijia Cai, Renliang Qian, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Chenyi Lei, Wenwu Ou, Fuzhen Zhuang


Abstract
Awakening dormant users, who remain engaged but exhibit low conversion, is a key driver for incremental GMV growth in e-commerce platforms. Existing methods often underperform since they typically rely on single-step estimation of an item’s intrinsic value (e.g., immediate click probability). This overlooks the instrumental effect of items, where specific interactions act as triggers to shape latent intent and drive subsequent decisions along a conversion trajectory. To bridge this gap, we propose RoleGen, a framework that synergizes a Conversion Trajectory Reasoner with a Generative Collaborative Executor. Specifically, the LLM-based Reasoner explicitly models the context-dependent Functional Role of items to reconstruct intent evolution. It further uses counterfactual role exploration to mitigate interest collapse and generate diverse conversion-oriented candidates. These reasoned candidate items are then injected into the Executor, which is optimized via a feedback-driven co-training mechanism to ensure grounded execution. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing on a large-scale e-commerce platform show a 5.82% gain in Recall@1 and a 6.71% increase in online order volume, confirming RoleGen’s effectiveness in activating dormant users.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-industry.199
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Pepa Atanasova, Gholamreza Haffari, Minghan Wang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3334–3356
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.199/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Huishi Luo, Shuokai Li, Hanchen Yang, Zhongbo Sun, Haojie Ding, Boheng Zhang, Zijia Cai, Renliang Qian, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Chenyi Lei, Wenwu Ou, and Fuzhen Zhuang. 2026. Awakening Dormant Users: Modeling Intent Evolution via LLM-based Functional Role Reasoning for Generative Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 3334–3356, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Awakening Dormant Users: Modeling Intent Evolution via LLM-based Functional Role Reasoning for Generative Recommendation (Luo et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-industry.199.pdf