At this year’s ACM RecSys 2025 in Prague, iCAIML member Ahmadou Wagne had the pleasure of presenting a tutorial on “Recent Advances in Generative Conversational Recommender Systems” together with an international team of researchers. This tutorial provided an overview of how the advancements of generative language models have reshaped research on conversational recommender systems, bridging foundational ideas with recent breakthroughs.

This tutorial was the result of a great collaborative effort by the members of the CDL RecSys at TU Wien, Thomas Kolb, Ahmadou Wagne, Julia Neidhardt, together with Ashmi Banerjee (TU Munich) and Fatemeh Nazary, Yashar Deldjoo, and Tommaso Di Noia (Politecnico di Bari).

Abstract

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are increasingly vital for delivering multi-turn, context-aware recommendations. This tutorial provides a concise yet comprehensive exploration of modern generative CRSs, highlighting recent advances in generative AI—such as breakthroughs in large language models and neural generation pipelines, that enhance dialogue management, user modeling, and response generation. In addition, the tutorial addresses core challenges, including data acquisition, multi-turn personalization, and evaluation issues, such as controlling hallucinations, accounting for social factors, and managing ethical considerations, while also discussing emerging risks and novel solutions. Ultimately, participants will be equipped with actionable insights and practical tools for building new conversational recommender systems powered by generative models.

Resources

The material and accompanying recordings to rewatch the talk are now available online:

• Tutorial open access publication in the ACM Digital Library.

• Download the Slides and Materials.

• Watch the video with slides on SlidesLive.

• Watch on YouTube.

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