Guidong Lei
Author directory2026
AgenticRec: A Recommendation-Oriented Agentic Framework with Progressive Tool-Integrated Reasoning Optimization
Tianyi Li | Zixuan Wang | Guidong Lei | Xiaodong Li | Hui Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Tianyi Li | Zixuan Wang | Guidong Lei | Xiaodong Li | Hui Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Recommender agents built on Large Language Models offer a promising paradigm for personalized recommendation. However, existing agents typically suffer from a misalignment between their tool-integrated reasoning trajectories and recommendation feedback, limiting their ability to distinguish fine-grained user preferences. To address these challenges, we propose AgenticRec, an agentic recommendation framework that formulates recommendation as a tool-integrated reasoning process over a recommendation-oriented tool suite. Built upon this framework, we further develop a dedicated two-stage training paradigm tailored for recommender agents. In the first stage, we introduce Recommendation-Oriented Trajectory Activation, optimize the agentic recommendation ability under implicit feedback. In the second stage, Progressive Preference Refinement further refines the agent through bidirectional preference reasoning over self-bootstrapped hard pairs, progressively sharpening preference boundaries. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of AgenticRec.