EvoRec: Self Evolving Agentic Recommender Systems

Abstract

Optimizing modern recommender systems still relies heavily on engineers iterating by hand, which is slow and bounded by individual expertise. LLM-based agents open a path toward automating this loop, yet two issues remain. First, the agent is used only as a code translator and accumulates no methodology across iterations. Second, the optimization space is confined to a predefined range and rarely introduces structurally new ideas. To address these problems, we propose EvoRec, a multi-agent framework that co-evolves the recommendation model and the optimization methodology driving it. Four collaborating agents carry out a dual-track loop: the Research Agent and Code Agent iterate the model each round, while the Skill Evolver periodically distills reusable methodology from a persistent Memory of past experiments. Experiments on two public benchmarks and one large-scale industrial dataset show that EvoRec improves offline metrics by up to 5.54% over the strongest baseline, and an online A/B test delivers a 1.85% revenue lift and a 1.02% CTR gain.