Mining Informative Interests via Latent Cross Reasoning for Search Enhanced Recommendation
Abstract
Search and recommendation (S&R) are fundamental components of modern commercial platforms, enabling users to access and explore information efficiently. User behaviors in these scenarios reflect different aspects of user intent, providing an opportunity for joint modeling of S&R. However, effectively leveraging search logs to enhance recommendation remains a challenging task. Existing methods often encode S&R histories either jointly or separately; however, they tend to regard all search signals as equally informative, thereby neglecting that many search behaviors can be irrelevant or even detrimental to recommendation performance. In practice, however, search histories frequently contain noisy or outdated behaviors that may introduce spurious correlations and degrade recommendation performance. Motivated by the human decision-making process, where one first identifies recommendation intent and then selectively reasons about relevant search signals, we propose LCR-SER, a latent cross reasoning method for search-enhanced recommendation. LCR-SER first encodes the user's S&R history into a unified latent representation that captures users' global interests. It then performs iterative reasoning in the latent space to dynamically identify informative search signals that are most relevant to the recommendation. To further guide this reasoning process, we introduce contrastive learning to align the reasoning states with the target items. In addition, we employ reinforcement learning to directly optimize ranking-oriented metrics, enabling LCR-SER to refine its reasoning strategy toward improved recommendation performance. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that LCR-SER consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating the effectiveness of latent reasoning in enhancing search-aware recommendation.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Julian J. McAuley | 52 | 61 Text Is All You Need: Learning Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 54 Neighborhood-Based Collaborative Filtering for Conversational Recommendation (2024) Conversational Recommendation Systems 51 A Review of Modern Recommender Systems Using Generative Models (Gen-RecSys) (2024) Generative Models for Recommendation and Content › Others |
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| 2 | Xinhang Li 0001 | 47 | 53 Empowering Large Language Model for Sequential Recommendation via Multimodal Embeddings and Semantic IDs (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 48 OpenSiteRec: An Open Dataset for Site Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 44 Optimal Transport Enhanced Cross-City Site Recommendation (2024) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 3 | Gyuseok Lee | 46 | 46 Capturing User Interests from Data Streams for Continual Sequential Recommendation (2026) Efficient Sequential Recommendation Architectures 34 Harmonic Dataset Distillation for Time Series Forecasting (2026) Others 33 Continual Collaborative Distillation for Recommender System (2024) Efficient and Lightweight Graph Collaborative Filtering |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 52 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Maolin Wang 0001 assigned | 52 | 15 papers | |
| Kun Gai COI: co-author | 50 | 5 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 COI: author | 48 | 2 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang COI: co-author | 47 | 4 papers | |
| Yanan Niu COI: co-author | 47 | 15 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 46 | 10 papers | |
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 46 | 8 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Xiao Zhang 0034 COI: author | 56 | 3 | 68 MoRE: A Mixture of Reflectors Framework for Large Language Model-Based Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 59 UniSAR: Modeling User Transition Behaviors between Search and Recommendation (2024) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 2 | Fei Sun 0001 COI: co-author | 54 | 3 | 59 Personalized re-ranking for recommendation (2019) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 57 Neural Re-ranking in Multi-stage Recommender Systems: A Review (2022) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 3 | Han Li 0005 COI: co-author | 52 | 3 | 70 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 59 Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 5 | Julian J. McAuley assigned | 52 | 3 | 61 Text Is All You Need: Learning Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 54 Neighborhood-Based Collaborative Filtering for Conversational Recommendation (2024) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
|
| 6 | Lantao Hu COI: co-author | 51 | 3 | 59 Unsupervised Ranking Ensemble Model for Recommendation (2024) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 59 Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 7 | Yang Song 0008 COI: co-author | 51 | 3 | 57 UniSAR: Modeling User Transition Behaviors between Search and Recommendation (2024) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 55 Enhancing Recommendation with Search Data in a Causal Learning Manner (2023) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
|
| 8 | Bo Peng 0009 | 50 | 3 | 61 Hybrid collaborative filtering methods for recommending search terms to clinicians (2021) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 47 M2: Mixed Models With Preferences, Popularities and Transitions for Next-Basket Recommendation (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 10 | Huifeng Guo | 50 | 3 | 53 Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Unifying Retrieval and Ranking with a Single Generative Recommendation Model (2025) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 48 LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 11 | Yang Zhang 0072 | 50 | 3 | 46 Reason4Rec: Deliberative User Preference Alignment of Large Language Models for Recommendation (2026) Preference Alignment and Optimization 46 TALLRec: An Effective and Efficient Tuning Framework to Align Large Language Model with Recommendation (2023) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 12 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 49 | 3 | 68 LLaRA: Large Language-Recommendation Assistant (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 46 On Softmax Direct Preference Optimization for Recommendation (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 13 | Jizhi Zhang | 49 | 3 | 65 Large Language Model Can Interpret Latent Space of Sequential Recommender (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 46 Large Language Models are Learnable Planners for Long-Term Recommendation (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 14 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 49 | 3 | 70 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 46 Towards a More User-Friendly and Easy-to-Use Benchmark Library for Recommender Systems (2023) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
|
| 15 | Chongming Gao | 48 | 3 | 68 Large Language Models are Learnable Planners for Long-Term Recommendation (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization 47 MGFRec: Towards Reinforced Reasoning Recommendation with Multiple Groundings and Feedback (2026) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 17 | Yu Zhang 0206 | 48 | 3 | 58 ESANS: Effective and Semantic-Aware Negative Sampling for Large-Scale Retrieval Systems (2025) Efficient Retrieval and Indexing Systems › Others 56 CROLoss: Towards a Customizable Loss for Retrieval Models in Recommender Systems (2022) Efficient Retrieval and Indexing Systems › Others |
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| 18 | Jie Jiang 0015 | 48 | 3 | 59 Cross-Scale Collaboration between LLMs and Lightweight Sequential Recommenders with Domain-Specific Latent Reasoning (2026) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 57 Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle: Empowering Sequential Recommendation with Large Language Models (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 19 | Jiancan Wu | 48 | 3 | 59 Customizing Language Models with Instance-wise LoRA for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 57 LLaRA: Large Language-Recommendation Assistant (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 20 | James Caverlee | 48 | 3 | 58 Language Models as Semantic Augmenters for Sequential Recommenders (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 45 Session-based Recommendation with Hypergraph Attention Networks (2021) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 21 | Mingdai Yang | 48 | 3 | 58 AgentDR: Dynamic Recommendation with Implicit Item-Item Relations via LLM-based Agents (2026) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 44 Pre-Training with Transferable Attention for Addressing Market Shifts in Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation (2024) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 22 | Jianghong Ma | 47 | 3 | 45 CoDeR+: Interest-aware Counterfactual Reasoning for Sequential Recommendation (2026) Explainable and Causal Recommendation 45 CoDeR: Counterfactual Demand Reasoning for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Explainable and Causal Recommendation |
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| 24 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 47 | 3 | 59 Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 47 DLCRec: A Novel Approach for Managing Diversity in LLM-Based Recommender Systems (2025) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 25 | Jianling Wang | 47 | 3 | 58 LLMs for User Interest Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 47 A Hierarchical Self-Attentive Model for Recommending User-Generated Item Lists (2019) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 26 | Yupeng Hou COI: co-author | 47 | 3 | 58 Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems (2024) Efficiency and Deployment 46 Towards a More User-Friendly and Easy-to-Use Benchmark Library for Recommender Systems (2023) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 28 | Bo Chen 0023 | 47 | 3 | 59 ReLLa: Retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 59 Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 29 | Xinhang Li 0001 assigned | 47 | 3 | 53 Empowering Large Language Model for Sequential Recommendation via Multimodal Embeddings and Semantic IDs (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 48 OpenSiteRec: An Open Dataset for Site Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
|
| 30 | Junwei Pan | 47 | 3 | 67 Empowering Large Language Model for Sequential Recommendation via Multimodal Embeddings and Semantic IDs (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 65 Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle: Empowering Sequential Recommendation with Large Language Models (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
|
| 31 | Wei Guo 0006 | 47 | 3 | 54 Efficient Personalized Reranking with Semi-autoregressive Generation and Online Knowledge Distillation (2026) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 53 Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Unifying Retrieval and Ranking with a Single Generative Recommendation Model (2025) Generative Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 32 | Wenlin Zhang 0001 | 47 | 3 | 48 LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 43 Exploring Recommender System Evaluation: A Multi-Modal LLM Agent Framework for A/B Testing (2026) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 34 | Junchen Fu | 46 | 3 | 49 Where to Go Next for Recommender Systems? ID- vs. Modality-based Recommender Models Revisited (2023) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 48 A Content-Driven Micro-Video Recommendation Dataset at Scale (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 36 | Min Hou 0004 | 46 | 3 | 59 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 47 RecCocktail: A Generalizable and Efficient Framework for LLM-Based Recommendation (2026) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 37 | Gyuseok Lee assigned | 46 | 3 | 46 Capturing User Interests from Data Streams for Continual Sequential Recommendation (2026) Efficient Sequential Recommendation Architectures 34 Harmonic Dataset Distillation for Time Series Forecasting (2026) Others |