Position Paper: Recommender Systems Should Shift to Personal Agent-Mediated Recommendation

_reachsumit · x · 2026-09-14

An arXiv position paper proposes PAMR (Personal Agent-Mediated Recommendation) as a new paradigm.

• Today's recommenders let platforms control candidate access, evidence boundaries, and explanations, not just ranking
• The authors argue the next bottleneck is control over evidence acquisition and disclosure, shifting from platform-side item ranking to user-side evidence mediation
• A personal agent would discover, filter, aggregate, and govern recommendation evidence across distributed sources for the user
• A proof-of-concept on hard Yelp restaurant tasks shows source selection and controlled disclosure offer the strongest utility-traceability-exposure-cost tradeoffs under a shared LLM ranker

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