HARP: Training-Free Dual-Profile Agentic Communication for LLM-Based Recommendation

In LLM-based recommendation, memory effectively plays the role of a user-level agent, typically built on top of a memory-augmented backbone. Yet under this paradigm users and items remain asymmetric participants: only the user is given a structured profile; that profile is consumed inside a bandwidth-limited reranker prompt; and it is frozen after warmup. Starting from this observation, we recast LLM-based recommendation as an agentic-communication process in four stages — Build a self-description, Transmit it along the collaborative graph, Understand the other side, and Sync it from the next interaction. Analysing the dominant memory-augmented paradigm through this formulation, we identify three open communication challenges that current pipelines leave unaddressed: the item side never produces a comparable self-description (one-sided Build); profile-level signals are routed only into a bandwidth-limited reranker prompt rather than into the retrieval stage where they would not compete for context tokens (prompt-trapped Understand); and the user's description is frozen after warmup with no principled update rule (absent Sync). We instantiate the missing stages as HARP (Homophily-aware Agentic Recommendation via dual Profiles}), a training-free, three-operator addition to a frozen LLM backbone: a rule-extracted symmetric item profile (zero extra LLM calls), a channel-decomposable profile-level homophily $\mathcal{H}({\varphi }_u,{\varphi }_i)$ consumed at retrieval time rather than inside the reranker prompt, and a critic-gated single-pass reflective update realising in-context profile evolution without any gradient step. On four public benchmarks (Yelp, Amazon Books, MovieTV, Goodreads), HARP lifts Hit@1 over the strongest published baseline by $6.9\%$–$24.0\%$, with family-wise Holm-corrected $p<10^{-9}$ on every dataset. Ablations and a per-case attribution study isolate each operator as a distinct, complementary source of gain; we also quantify and openly report the trade-off introduced by the reflective pass. Our contribution is a unified formulation of agentic communication for LLM-based recommendation, together with a training-free three-operator instantiation on top of it.