AtomRec: Evolving Atomic Memory for Agentic Recommendation

Abstract

Agentic recommender systems use large language models to maintain semantic memory and support evidence-aware recommendation. However, existing memory mechanisms often compress user and item information into coarse summaries and connect them with scalar collaborative links, making it difficult to preserve fine-grained preference stages or retrieve interpretable evidence as user interests evolve. We propose \textsc{AtomRec}, an agentic recommender with evolving atomic collaborative memory. \textsc{AtomRec} represents user and item memories as structured atomic units, builds semantic links across related memories, and evolves related historical fields when new interactions arrive. During recommendation, it retrieves linked memories as multi-hop evidence paths rather than isolated neighbor summaries, allowing collaborative signals to support grounded ranking. Experiments on four public benchmarks show that \textsc{AtomRec} consistently outperforms state-of-the-art agentic and memory-augmented baselines, with around 8.5\% average relative improvement across metrics.