Paper Detail

RecHarness: A Bandit-Routed Agentic Harness for Self-Evolving Recommender Systems

Haoran Ling, Yuecheng Li, Zeyu Song, Jing Yao, Shuwen Kang, Chi Lu, Wenjin Wu, Peng Jiang

huggingface Score 10.0

Published 2026-07-31 · First seen 2026-08-04

General AI

Abstract

Optimizing modern recommender models still depends heavily on engineers manually iterating over architectural, objective, and training-strategy changes. While LLM-based agents can automate this trial-and-error process, allowing the LLM to both select modification directions and generate concrete hypotheses often leads to unstable search under limited experiment budgets. Inspired by the above challenge, we propose RecHarness, a Bandit-Routed Agentic Harness for automated recommender model optimization. RecHarness separates the optimization process into two steps: a bandit router selects the next modification direction according to historical validation feedback, while the LLM generates a concrete optimization hypothesis and executable code edit within the selected direction. To sustain long-horizon exploration, RecHarness uses a jump-basin mechanism to activate a structural-jump arm when local edits stagnate. Across multiple recommendation tasks, datasets, and model backbones, RecHarness achieves more stable performance improvements and uses limited trial budgets more effectively than LLM-reasoning search. During a 7-day online A/B test on a large-scale short-video advertising platform, the selected candidate improves ADVV by 2.084%, Revenue by 0.534%, and Exposure by 0.559%. Code is available at https://github.com/6lyc/RecHarness.

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BibTeX

@misc{ling2026recharness,
  title = {RecHarness: A Bandit-Routed Agentic Harness for Self-Evolving Recommender Systems},
  author = {Haoran Ling and Yuecheng Li and Zeyu Song and Jing Yao and Shuwen Kang and Chi Lu and Wenjin Wu and Peng Jiang},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Optimizing modern recommender models still depends heavily on engineers manually iterating over architectural, objective, and training-strategy changes. While LLM-based agents can automate this trial-and-error process, allowing the LLM to both select modification directions and generate concrete hypotheses often leads to unstable search under limited experiment budgets. Inspired by the above challenge, we propose RecHarness, a Bandit-Routed Agentic Harness for automated recommender model optimiz},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2607.29241},
  keywords = {code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2607.29241},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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