RecEvolve: A Knowledge-Driven Autonomous Agent System for Recommender Systems
Weidi Pan, He Ma, Shuhao Ye, Palaksh Rungta, David McPeek, Junyi Jiao, Arnab Bhadury, Mingyan Gao, Onkar Dalal
Abstract
The rise of agentic AI has catalyzed a shift toward self-iterating systems, opening new frontiers for the autonomous optimization of production recommender models. This paper presents the empirical validation of a knowledge-driven autonomous agent system, deployed directly on a production large-scale Two-Tower retrieval model. By delegating the entire research lifecycle, spanning idea generation, code implementation, offline training, and metric evaluation, to a continuous closed-loop autonomous framework, the agent system executed over 40 completed autonomous training runs from scratch. Executing these runs under rigorous production-scale evaluations, the system systematically navigated hidden architectural bottlenecks on the latest production model to achieve a breakthrough ~20% relative improvement in NDCG, a gain that translated directly to a +3.77% increase in user satisfaction in live production traffic. Furthermore, the deployment exposed critical vulnerabilities in standard evaluation protocols, as the agent system autonomously discovered reward-hacking shortcuts. These findings prove that an autonomous pipeline can dramatically accelerate the pace of machine learning research and stress-test the rigorousness of underlying experimental infrastructure, while also exposing novel challenges such as reward hacking and redundant exploration of failed hypotheses.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.