Neutralizing Popularity Bias in LLM-based Recommendation via Counterfactual Reasoning Guidelines
cs.AI
Submitted: 2025-03-11
Updated: 2026-09-05
Code: https://github.com/kylokano/CausalX
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: In the era of generative AI, recommender systems are moving from precise prediction to trustworthy generation.
Terminology
Abstract
In the era of generative AI, recommender systems are moving from precise prediction to trustworthy generation. Large language models (LLMs) support this shift by inferring user interests and producing natural-language explanations. However, LLM-based recommendation suffers from a fundamental obstacle: popularity bias. Through pre-training on massive corpora, LLMs tend to rely on global statistics and trend signals, yielding recommendations that follow popularity rather than genuine preference. As this bias is entangled in model parameters and is hard to remove directly, we propose Neutralizing Popularity Bias in LLM-based Recommendation via Counterfactual Reasoning Guidelines (NPRec), a model-agnostic framework that mitigates popularity bias through external semantic intervention. NPRec performs counterfactual refinement to causally separate intrinsic user interests from popularity-driven conformity, producing debiased textual guidelines that reflect actual user preferences. These guidelines are injected at inference time to shift the LLM from unconstrained generation to guided reasoning, without any parameter updates. Serving as explicit premises, they both ground faithful explanations and improve recommendation quality. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that NPRec achieves promising performance in recommendation accuracy, explanation quality, and debiasing capability.
Sources
- LLM-Guided Multi-View Hypergraph Learning for Human-Centric Explainable Recommendation
- An Empirical Study of LLM-as-a-Judge for LLM Evaluation: Fine-tuned Judge Model is not a General Substitute for GPT-4
- Is ChatGPT a Good Recommender? A Preliminary Study
- XRec: Large Language Models for Explainable Recommendation
- COFFEE: Counterfactual Fairness for Personalized Text Generation in Explainable Recommendation
- RecMind: Large Language Model Powered Agent For Recommendation
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