Awesome Generative AI in Search, Recommendation, Personalization

Generative AI and LLMs for Search, Recommender, Personalization Engines

The goal of this repository is to survey and review generative AI and LLM-based methods for building large-scale search and recommender engines. see also LLM Evaluation methods repository

• LLM and Search and Recommender Engines
  • Search Surveys
  • Recommender Engine Surveys
  • Conferences, workshops
    • Industrial Conferences
  • Tutorials
  • Software, libraries, frameworks
  • Agentic Search
  • FreshLLM and similar architectures (LLM and large scale search)
  • Conversational Search
  • Search Assistance
  • Multi Turn
  • Search as Task Solving
  • Personalization
  • Multi modal
  • Multi lingual
  • Question Answering
  • Querying Structured Information
  • RAG
    • Knowledge Graphs and RAG, GraphRAG
      • Industrial blog articles
  • Retrieval
  • Ranking for Search
    • Reranking
    • Classical bi-encoder and cross encoder ranking,
  • Query Understanding
  • Embedding models
    • Embedding models Evaluation
    • Optimization of embedding models
    • Embedding training
    • Fine-tuning embedding models
  • Document understanding
  • Response generation, presentation of the search results
  • Deep Research
  • Hybrid search vs vector search
  • Recommender Engines
  • Discovery
  • Unclassified
  • Recommender Rankers
  • Sequential Recommendation
  • Industrial approaches
  • Evaluation of Search engines
    • Evaluation of RAG and QA
    • Evaluation Deep Research
    • Evaluation Agentic Search
    • Evaluation Reasoning and RAG
    • Question Answering benchmarks
  • Blog posts, whitepapers
  • Verticals
    • Product Search
    • Location Aware (Maps, real estate, local. travel)
    • Ads / advertisement
    • Real estate
    • Healthcare
    • Science
    • Finance
    • Legal
    • Job
    • Search Engine Optimization
    • MRO Maintenance Repair OVerhaul Manufacturing

Search Surveys

• A Comprehensive Survey on Reinforcement Learning-based Agentic Search: Foundations, Roles, Optimizations, Evaluations, and Applications, Oct 2025, arxiv
• A Survey on AI Search with Large Language Models, July 2025, preprints, not peer reviewed
• A Survey of Large Language Model Empowered Agents for Recommendation and Search: Towards Next-Generation Information Retrieval, Mar 2025, arxiv
• A Survey on Knowledge-Oriented Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Mar 2025, arxiv
• From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval, Feb 2025, Journal Version, ACM Transaction on Information Systems, Feb 2025
• Cross-Modal Retrieval: A Systematic Review of Methods and Future Directions, Jan 2025, IEEE
• Improving Recommendation Systems & Search in the Age of LLMs by Eugene Neyan, Mar 2025, blog post
• A Survey of Model Architectures in Information Retrieval, Jan 2025, arxiv
• A Survey of Conversational Search, Oct 2024, arxiv
• Large language models for generative information extraction: a survey, 2024, Front Comp Sci
• From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval, Apr 2024, arxiv
• Dense Text Retrieval Based on Pretrained Language Models: A Survey, Feb 2024, ACM
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey, 2023, simg
• Large Language Models for Information Retrieval: A Survey, Aug 2023, arxiv

Recommender Engine Surveys

• A Comprehensive Review on Harnessing Large Language Models to Overcome Recommender System Challenges, Jul 2025, arxiv
• A Comprehensive Survey on Cross-Domain Recommendation: Taxonomy, Progress, and Prospects, Mar 2025. arxiv
• A Survey on LLM-powered Agents for Recommender Systems, Feb 2025, arxiv: RE: based on DeepSeek-R methods for training reasoning and interleaved LLMs calling search as a tool.
• How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Survey, ACM Transactions on Information Systems 2025
• Graph Foundation Models for Recommendation: A Comprehensive Survey, Feb 2025, arxiv
• Recommender Systems in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs), TKDE Nov 2024 by subscription
• Multimodal Pretraining, Adaptation, and Generation for Recommendation: A Survey, Jul 2024, arxiv
• A Review of Modern Recommender Systems Using Generative Models (Gen-RecSys), KDD 2024 pdf
• A Comprehensive Survey on Retrieval Methods in Recommender Systems, Jul 2024, arxiv
• A Survey of Generative Search and Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models, Apr 2024, arxiv
• A survey on large language models for recommendation, WWW 2024 Springer
• Towards Next-Generation LLM-based Recommender Systems: A Survey and Beyond, Oct 2024, arxiv
• Exploring the Impact of Large Language Models on Recommender Systems: An Extensive Review, Feb 2024, arxiv
• Pre-train, Prompt, and Recommendation: A Comprehensive Survey of Language Modeling Paradigm Adaptations in Recommender Systems , Dec 2023, MIT

Conferences, Workshops

• ICDM MMSR 2025
• SIGIR 2025
• 2025 SIGIR Workshop on eCommerce
• RecSys
• KDD 2024' Workshop on Generative AI for Recommender Systems and Personalization
• CIKM 2024 1st Workshop on Multimodal Search and Recommendations
• SIGIR 2024 Workshop on eCommerce ECOM24
• WWW 2024 The 2nd Workshop on Recommendation with Generative Models
• EACL 2024 Workshop on Personalization of Generative AI Systems
• SIGIR 2024 The First Workshop on Large Language Models (LLMs) for Evaluation in Information Retrieval
• SIGIR 2024 The Second Workshop on Generative Information Retrieval

Industrial conferences

• Haystack Haystack
• Activate Activate

Tutorials

Software, libraries, frameworks

• HuggingFace Deep Research
• Open Deep Research from LangChain
• Open Deep Search by Sentian AI
• RankLLM SIGIR 2025 article
• Nvidia Merlin Recommender systems, including Transformer4Rec
• OpenP5 RecSys23 tutorial
• The smallest vector index in the world. RAG Everything with LEANN!

Agentic Search

also see Evaluation Agentic Search

• Agentic-R: Learning to Retrieve for Agentic Search, Jan 202