EchoTrace: Diagnosing Recursive Risks in LLM-Powered Recommender Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into recommender systems as data augmenters, profile generators, and recommendation modules. While these roles can enhance semantic understanding and recommendation quality, they also introduce LLM-specific risks such as bias and hallucination. These risks become more critical in feedback-loop settings, where LLM-generated signals and recommendations recursively shape future training data and recommendation dynamics. In this paper, we propose a role-aware, phase-wise diagnostic framework for analyzing how LLM-induced risks emerge, propagate, and accumulate in LLM-powered recommender systems. Our framework combines controlled feedback-loop simulation with longitudinal phase-wise diagnosis across LLM-generated content, recommendation outputs, feedback-loop dynamics, and ecosystem-level effects. Experiments on widely used benchmarks show that LLM-based components can amplify popularity bias, introduce spurious signals through hallucination, and gradually produce polarized and self-reinforcing exposure patterns over time. The code for EchoTrace is available at https://github.com/DongUk-Park/EchoTrace.