Echoes in the Loop: Diagnosing Risks in LLM-Powered Recommender Systems under Feedback Loops

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Park, Donguk, Lee, Dongwon, Lee, Yeon-Chang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Park, Donguk
Lee, Dongwon
Lee, Yeon-Chang
author_facet Park, Donguk
Lee, Dongwon
Lee, Yeon-Chang
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded into recommender systems, where they operate across multiple functional roles such as data augmentation, profiling, and decision making. While prior work emphasizes recommendation performance, the systemic risks of LLMs, such as bias and hallucination, and their propagation through feedback loops remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a role-aware, phase-wise diagnostic framework that traces how these risks emerge, manifest in ranking outcomes, and accumulate over repeated recommendation cycles. We formalize a controlled feedback-loop pipeline that simulates long-term interaction dynamics and enables empirical measurement of risks at the LLM-generated content, ranking, and ecosystem levels. Experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that LLM-based components can amplify popularity bias, introduce spurious signals through hallucination, and lead to polarized and self-reinforcing exposure patterns over time. We plan to release our framework as an open-source toolkit to facilitate systematic risk analysis across diverse LLM-powered recommender systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07442
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Echoes in the Loop: Diagnosing Risks in LLM-Powered Recommender Systems under Feedback Loops
Park, Donguk
Lee, Dongwon
Lee, Yeon-Chang
Human-Computer Interaction
Information Retrieval
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded into recommender systems, where they operate across multiple functional roles such as data augmentation, profiling, and decision making. While prior work emphasizes recommendation performance, the systemic risks of LLMs, such as bias and hallucination, and their propagation through feedback loops remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a role-aware, phase-wise diagnostic framework that traces how these risks emerge, manifest in ranking outcomes, and accumulate over repeated recommendation cycles. We formalize a controlled feedback-loop pipeline that simulates long-term interaction dynamics and enables empirical measurement of risks at the LLM-generated content, ranking, and ecosystem levels. Experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that LLM-based components can amplify popularity bias, introduce spurious signals through hallucination, and lead to polarized and self-reinforcing exposure patterns over time. We plan to release our framework as an open-source toolkit to facilitate systematic risk analysis across diverse LLM-powered recommender systems.
title Echoes in the Loop: Diagnosing Risks in LLM-Powered Recommender Systems under Feedback Loops
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07442