Prompt-Based LLMs for Position Bias-Aware Reranking in Personalized Recommendations

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Hauptverfasser: Islam, Md Aminul, Faruk, Ahmed Sayeed
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Islam, Md Aminul
Faruk, Ahmed Sayeed
author_facet Islam, Md Aminul
Faruk, Ahmed Sayeed
contents Recommender systems are essential for delivering personalized content across digital platforms by modeling user preferences and behaviors. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been adopted for prompt-based recommendation due to their ability to generate personalized outputs without task-specific training. However, LLM-based methods face limitations such as limited context window size, inefficient pointwise and pairwise prompting, and difficulty handling listwise ranking due to token constraints. LLMs can also be sensitive to position bias, as they may overemphasize earlier items in the prompt regardless of their true relevance. To address and investigate these issues, we propose a hybrid framework that combines a traditional recommendation model with an LLM for reranking top-k items using structured prompts. We evaluate the effects of user history reordering and instructional prompts for mitigating position bias. Experiments on MovieLens-100K show that randomizing user history improves ranking quality, but LLM-based reranking does not outperform the base model. Explicit instructions to reduce position bias are also ineffective. Our evaluations reveal limitations in LLMs' ability to model ranking context and mitigate bias. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/aminul7506/LLMForReRanking.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_04948
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prompt-Based LLMs for Position Bias-Aware Reranking in Personalized Recommendations
Islam, Md Aminul
Faruk, Ahmed Sayeed
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Recommender systems are essential for delivering personalized content across digital platforms by modeling user preferences and behaviors. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been adopted for prompt-based recommendation due to their ability to generate personalized outputs without task-specific training. However, LLM-based methods face limitations such as limited context window size, inefficient pointwise and pairwise prompting, and difficulty handling listwise ranking due to token constraints. LLMs can also be sensitive to position bias, as they may overemphasize earlier items in the prompt regardless of their true relevance. To address and investigate these issues, we propose a hybrid framework that combines a traditional recommendation model with an LLM for reranking top-k items using structured prompts. We evaluate the effects of user history reordering and instructional prompts for mitigating position bias. Experiments on MovieLens-100K show that randomizing user history improves ranking quality, but LLM-based reranking does not outperform the base model. Explicit instructions to reduce position bias are also ineffective. Our evaluations reveal limitations in LLMs' ability to model ranking context and mitigate bias. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/aminul7506/LLMForReRanking.
title Prompt-Based LLMs for Position Bias-Aware Reranking in Personalized Recommendations
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04948