{"paper":{"title":"Instructional Prompt Optimization for Few-Shot LLM-Based Recommendations on Cold-Start Users","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Bo Su, Chao Yao, Haowei Yang, Sitao Min, Wei Xu, Yushang Zhao","submitted_at":"2025-09-11T00:13:17Z","abstract_excerpt":"The cold-start user issue further compromises the effectiveness of recommender systems in limiting access to the historical behavioral information. It is an effective pipeline to optimize instructional prompts on a few-shot large language model (LLM) used in recommender tasks. We introduce a context-conditioned prompt formulation method P(u,\\ Ds)\\ \\rightarrow\\ R\\widehat, where u is a cold-start user profile, Ds is a curated support set, and R\\widehat is the predicted ranked list of items. Based on systematic experimentation with transformer-based autoregressive LLMs (BioGPT, LLaMA-2, GPT-4), w"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2509.09066","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2509.09066/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}