Try Before You Evolve: Ranking-Scored Trials for Recursive Self-Improvement of Recommender Systems

Abstract

Recommenders on Web platforms such as e-commerce and music streaming need their training recipes re-tuned for each dataset. Large language model (LLM) agents can now rewrite these recipes, enabling recursive self-improvement (RSI) of recommender systems. Existing agents propose one edit per round, fully retrain the recommender, and keep the edit only if its ranking quality improves. Unlike programs or patches that can be scored by execution, a recommender edit changes how the model is trained, which raises two challenges. First, ranking feedback is delayed: an edit's ranking quality is known only after full retraining, so much of the retraining budget goes to edits that are later discarded. Second, the signals available before retraining are unreliable: sampled training losses can look solved while full-ranking performance remains poor, and they are not comparable across edits that change the loss or sampler. We propose RecRSI, which generates diverse candidate edits from a diagnosis of the current model and selects one for full retraining using early ranking feedback: each candidate receives a short trial, the first steps of its full training run, scored by full-ranking NDCG@10 on held-out probe users. With two sequential recommenders on three datasets and the same number of full retrainings, RecRSI significantly outperforms existing self-evolving agents in every setting, and on both Amazon datasets reaches in its first round a ranking quality that none of them reaches in five.