Prompt-Unknown Promotion Attacks against LLM-based Sequential Recommender Systems
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
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Xin Xin 0003 | 56 |
Area-chair candidates (6)
| Xin Xin 0003 assigned | 56 | 10 papers | |
| Yanan Niu | 50 | 15 papers | |
| Leyu Lin | 48 | 15 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 48 | 5 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 47 | 4 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 45 | 10 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |