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Prompt-Unknown Promotion Attacks against LLM-based Sequential Recommender Systems

sigir26-167 · Full research paper · Yuchuan Zhao, Tong Chen, Junliang Yu, Zongwei Wang, Lizhen Cui, Hongzhi Yin
Bias Mitigation Methods · 50% Robustness to Noise and Distribution · 25% Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequ · 12% LLM-Enhanced Sequential Recommendati · 12%
Abstract

Large language model-powered sequential recommender systems (LLM-SRSs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance, enabling recommendations through prompt-driven inference over user interaction sequences. However, this paradigm also introduces new security vulnerabilities, particularly text-level manipulations, rendering them appealing targets for promotion attacks that purposely boost the ranking of specific target items. Although such security risks have been receiving increasing attention, existing studies typically rely on an unrealistic assumption of access to either the victim model or prompt to unveil attack mechanisms. In this work, we investigate the item promotion attack in LLM-SRSs under a more realistic setting where both the system prompt and victim model are unknown to the attacker, and propose a Prompt-Unknown Dual-poisoning Attack (PUDA) framework. To simulate attacks under this full black-box setting, we introduce an LLMbased evolutionary refinement strategy that infers discrete system prompts, enabling the training of an effective surrogate model that mimics the behaviors of the victim model. Leveraging the distilled prompt and surrogate model, we devise a promotion attack that adversarially revises target item texts under semantic constraints, which is further complemented by the highly plausible, surrogategenerated poisoning sequences to enable cost-effective target item promotion. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that PUDA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in boosting the exposure of unpopular target items. Our findings reveal critical security risks in modern LLM-SRSs even when both prompts and models are protected, and highlight the need for more robust defensive means.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Sunhao Dai
63
69 Unifying Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval: New Challenges in the LLM Era (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods
69 Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval Systems: New Challenges in the LLM Era (2024) Bias Mitigation Methods
66 Neural Retrievers are Biased Towards LLM-Generated Content (2024) Robustness and Adversarial IR
2 Yifan Wang 0017
58
76 Intersectional Two-sided Fairness in Recommendation (2024) Popularity Bias and Long-Tail Debiasing
75 Improving Long-tail User CTR Prediction via Hierarchical Distribution Alignment (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods
56 Double Correction Framework for Denoising Recommendation (2024) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
3 Miaomiao Cai 0001
52
54 RMBRec: Robust Multi-Behavior Recommendation towards Target Behaviors (2026) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
51 Popularity-Aware Alignment and Contrast for Mitigating Popularity Bias (2024) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation
51 Mitigating Recommendation Biases via Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity in Representation Learning (2024) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Xin Xin 0003 56
Area-chair candidates (6)
Xin Xin 0003 assigned 5610 papers
Yanan Niu 5015 papers
Leyu Lin 4815 papers
Kun Gai 485 papers
Xiaoxue Zang 474 papers
Pengyue Jia 4510 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Hao Liu 0078 COI: co-author 67 3
69 Mitigating Fine-tuning Bias: A Parameter-Efficient Debiasing Framework for Large Language Models (2026) Bias Mitigation Methods
64 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation
2 Sunhao Dai assigned 63 3
69 Unifying Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval: New Challenges in the LLM Era (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods
69 Bias and Unfairness in Information Retrieval Systems: New Challenges in the LLM Era (2024) Bias Mitigation Methods
3 Yifan Wang 0017 assigned 58 3
76 Intersectional Two-sided Fairness in Recommendation (2024) Popularity Bias and Long-Tail Debiasing
75 Improving Long-tail User CTR Prediction via Hierarchical Distribution Alignment (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods
5 Fei Sun 0001 53 3
69 LoRec: Combating Poisons with Large Language Model for Robust Sequential Recommendation (2024) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
56 Accelerating the Surrogate Retraining for Poisoning Attacks against Recommender Systems (2024) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
6 Zhengyi Yang 0007 52 3
73 Item-side Fairness of Large Language Model-based Recommendation System (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization
64 A Generic Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation with Distribution Shifts (2023) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation
7 Miaomiao Cai 0001 assigned 52 3
54 RMBRec: Robust Multi-Behavior Recommendation towards Target Behaviors (2026) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
51 Popularity-Aware Alignment and Contrast for Mitigating Popularity Bias (2024) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation
9 Yang Song 0008 50 3
56 Inverse Learning with Extremely Sparse Feedback for Recommendation (2024) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
52 When Search Meets Recommendation: Learning Disentangled Search Representation for Recommendation (2023) Search and Recommendation Integration
10 Seongmin Park 0002 50 3
51 Dual Unbiased Recommender Learning for Implicit Feedback (2021) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation
51 Bilateral Self-unbiased Learning from Biased Implicit Feedback (2022) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation
11 Yu-An Liu 0028 50 3
66 Attack-in-the-Chain: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for Attacks Against Black-Box Neural Ranking Models (2025) Robustness and Adversarial IR
66 Topic-oriented Adversarial Attacks against Black-box Neural Ranking Models (2023) Robustness and Adversarial IR
12 Lantao Hu 49 3
57 Natural Language Explainable Recommendation with Robustness Enhancement (2024) Explainable and Causal Recommendation
51 Modeling User Fatigue for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation
13 Riwei Lai 49 3
56 DAR: Dimension-Adaptive Recommendation with Multi-Granular Noise Control (2025) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
45 Proxy-Aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2023) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation
14 Jianling Wang 49 3
52 Learning to Augment for Casual User Recommendation (2022) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation
48 A Hierarchical Self-Attentive Model for Recommending User-Generated Item Lists (2019) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation
15 Min Hou 0004 49 3
64 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation
51 Mitigating Recommendation Biases via Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity in Representation Learning (2024) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation
16 Jieming Zhu 48 3
56 Directional Adversarial Training for Recommender Systems (2020) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
51 EAGER: Two-Stream Generative Recommender with Behavior-Semantic Collaboration (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs
19 Jizhi Zhang 48 3
73 Item-side Fairness of Large Language Model-based Recommendation System (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization
60 Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation (2023) Preference Alignment and Optimization
20 Yongxin Ni 48 3
72 Causality-Inspired Fair Representation Learning for Multimodal Recommendation (2025) Bias Mitigation Methods
50 Bridging NIP and MLM: A Unified Meta-Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation (2026) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation
21 Hyunsik Yoo 48 3
56 Generalizable Recommender System During Temporal Popularity Distribution Shifts (2025) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
48 Ensuring User-side Fairness in Dynamic Recommender Systems (2024) Popularity Bias and Long-Tail Debiasing
22 Jin Chen 0008 47 3
56 Dual Test-Time Training for Out-of-Distribution Recommender System (2025) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift
48 Cooperative Retriever and Ranker in Deep Recommenders (2023) Recommendation with Search and Ranking
24 Bowen Zheng 0005 46 3
49 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation
45 Towards a More User-Friendly and Easy-to-Use Benchmark Library for Recommender Systems (2023) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation
25 Chongming Gao COI: co-author 46 3
52 Alleviating Matthew Effect of Offline Reinforcement Learning in Interactive Recommendation (2023) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation
48 SPRec: Self-Play to Debias LLM-based Recommendation (2025) Preference Alignment and Optimization
26 Jiancan Wu 46 3
51 Customizing Language Models with Instance-wise LoRA for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation
50 LLaRA: Large Language-Recommendation Assistant (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation
27 Xiao Zhang 0034 46 3
56 When Search Meets Recommendation: Learning Disentangled Search Representation for Recommendation (2023) Recommendation with Search and Ranking
47 UniSAR: Modeling User Transition Behaviors between Search and Recommendation (2024) Recommendation with Search and Ranking
28 Yongjing Hao 46 3
50 Feature-Level Deeper Self-Attention Network With Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation
48 Meta-Optimized Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders
30 Shuchang Liu 0001 45 3
59 DLCRec: A Novel Approach for Managing Diversity in LLM-Based Recommender Systems (2025) Preference Alignment and Optimization
50 Distinguished Quantized Guidance for Diffusion-based Sequence Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders
31 Qiang Luo 0004 45 3
50 MPFormer: Adaptive Framework for Industrial Multi-Task Personalized Sequential Retriever (2025) Multi-Task and Multi-Objective Optimization
49 OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs
32 Bo Peng 0009 45 3
48 M2: Mixed Models With Preferences, Popularities and Transitions for Next-Basket Recommendation (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation
45 eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data (2024) Efficiency and Deployment
33 Bo Chen 0023 45 3
51 Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation
51 ReLLa: Retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation
34 Han Li 0005 45 3
52 DiffusionGS: Generative Search with Query Conditioned Diffusion in Kuaishou (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders
49 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation
35 Chen Wang 0052 45 3
52 Confidence-Aware Fine-Tuning of Sequential Recommendation Systems Via Conformal Prediction (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation
51 Cluster-Aware Item Prompt Learning for Session-Based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Enhanced Sequential Recommendation
36 Junjie Zhang 0009 45 3
50 A Pre-trained Plug-in Mixture-of-LoRAs Model for Transferable Sequential Recommendation (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation
45 Towards a More User-Friendly and Easy-to-Use Benchmark Library for Recommender Systems (2023) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation