GISTBench: Evaluating LLM User Understanding via Evidence-Based Interest Verification

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Hauptverfasser: Fostiropoulos, Iordanis, Azhar, Muhammad Rafay, Sawwan, Abdalaziz, Fang, Boyu, Liu, Yuchen, Liu, Jiayi, Yu, Hanchao, Guo, Qi, Wang, Jianyu, Liu, Fei, Fan, Xiangjun
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Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Fostiropoulos, Iordanis
Azhar, Muhammad Rafay
Sawwan, Abdalaziz
Fang, Boyu
Liu, Yuchen
Liu, Jiayi
Yu, Hanchao
Guo, Qi
Wang, Jianyu
Liu, Fei
Fan, Xiangjun
author_facet Fostiropoulos, Iordanis
Azhar, Muhammad Rafay
Sawwan, Abdalaziz
Fang, Boyu
Liu, Yuchen
Liu, Jiayi
Yu, Hanchao
Guo, Qi
Wang, Jianyu
Liu, Fei
Fan, Xiangjun
contents We introduce GISTBench, a benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to understand users from their interaction histories in recommendation systems. Unlike traditional RecSys benchmarks that focus on item prediction accuracy, our benchmark evaluates how well LLMs can extract and verify user interests from engagement data. We propose two novel metric families: Interest Groundedness (IG), decomposed into precision and recall components to separately penalize hallucinated interest categories and reward coverage, and Interest Specificity (IS), which assesses the distinctiveness of verified LLM-predicted user profiles. We release a synthetic dataset constructed on real user interactions on a global short-form video platform. Our dataset contains both implicit and explicit engagement signals and rich textual descriptions. We validate our dataset fidelity against user surveys, and evaluate eight open-weight LLMs spanning 7B to 120B parameters. Our findings reveal performance bottlenecks in current LLMs, particularly their limited ability to accurately count and attribute engagement signals across heterogeneous interaction types.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_29112
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GISTBench: Evaluating LLM User Understanding via Evidence-Based Interest Verification
Fostiropoulos, Iordanis
Azhar, Muhammad Rafay
Sawwan, Abdalaziz
Fang, Boyu
Liu, Yuchen
Liu, Jiayi
Yu, Hanchao
Guo, Qi
Wang, Jianyu
Liu, Fei
Fan, Xiangjun
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
H.3.3; I.2.7
We introduce GISTBench, a benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to understand users from their interaction histories in recommendation systems. Unlike traditional RecSys benchmarks that focus on item prediction accuracy, our benchmark evaluates how well LLMs can extract and verify user interests from engagement data. We propose two novel metric families: Interest Groundedness (IG), decomposed into precision and recall components to separately penalize hallucinated interest categories and reward coverage, and Interest Specificity (IS), which assesses the distinctiveness of verified LLM-predicted user profiles. We release a synthetic dataset constructed on real user interactions on a global short-form video platform. Our dataset contains both implicit and explicit engagement signals and rich textual descriptions. We validate our dataset fidelity against user surveys, and evaluate eight open-weight LLMs spanning 7B to 120B parameters. Our findings reveal performance bottlenecks in current LLMs, particularly their limited ability to accurately count and attribute engagement signals across heterogeneous interaction types.
title GISTBench: Evaluating LLM User Understanding via Evidence-Based Interest Verification
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
H.3.3; I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29112