Consistent Explainers or Unreliable Narrators? Understanding LLM-generated Group Recommendations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Waterschoot, Cedric, Tintarev, Nava, Barile, Francesco
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Waterschoot, Cedric
Tintarev, Nava
Barile, Francesco
author_facet Waterschoot, Cedric
Tintarev, Nava
Barile, Francesco
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being implemented as joint decision-makers and explanation generators for Group Recommender Systems (GRS). In this paper, we evaluate these recommendations and explanations by comparing them to social choice-based aggregation strategies. Our results indicate that LLM-generated recommendations often resembled those produced by Additive Utilitarian (ADD) aggregation. However, the explanations typically referred to averaging ratings (resembling but not identical to ADD aggregation). Group structure, uniform or divergent, did not impact the recommendations. Furthermore, LLMs regularly claimed additional criteria such as user or item similarity, diversity, or used undefined popularity metrics or thresholds. Our findings have important implications for LLMs in the GRS pipeline as well as standard aggregation strategies. Additional criteria in explanations were dependent on the number of ratings in the group scenario, indicating potential inefficiency of standard aggregation methods at larger item set sizes. Additionally, inconsistent and ambiguous explanations undermine transparency and explainability, which are key motivations behind the use of LLMs for GRS.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_13705
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Consistent Explainers or Unreliable Narrators? Understanding LLM-generated Group Recommendations
Waterschoot, Cedric
Tintarev, Nava
Barile, Francesco
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being implemented as joint decision-makers and explanation generators for Group Recommender Systems (GRS). In this paper, we evaluate these recommendations and explanations by comparing them to social choice-based aggregation strategies. Our results indicate that LLM-generated recommendations often resembled those produced by Additive Utilitarian (ADD) aggregation. However, the explanations typically referred to averaging ratings (resembling but not identical to ADD aggregation). Group structure, uniform or divergent, did not impact the recommendations. Furthermore, LLMs regularly claimed additional criteria such as user or item similarity, diversity, or used undefined popularity metrics or thresholds. Our findings have important implications for LLMs in the GRS pipeline as well as standard aggregation strategies. Additional criteria in explanations were dependent on the number of ratings in the group scenario, indicating potential inefficiency of standard aggregation methods at larger item set sizes. Additionally, inconsistent and ambiguous explanations undermine transparency and explainability, which are key motivations behind the use of LLMs for GRS.
title Consistent Explainers or Unreliable Narrators? Understanding LLM-generated Group Recommendations
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13705