Introduction
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for understanding users in search and recommendation. While traditional behavior-based or feature-driven user models rely primarily on explicit interactions or handcrafted representations, LLMs introduce a fundamentally different paradigm: LLM-powered user profiling, where user preferences, intents, and contextual attributes can be extracted, summarized, or reasoned about directly through natural language.
This shift unlocks powerful new paths to achieve personalization but also raises pressing questions related to modeling fidelity, temporal dynamics, evaluation methodology, privacy, and responsible deployment.
The LLM-UP workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to systematize emerging progress in LLM-powered user profiling, identify open challenges, and explore opportunities for integrating such techniques into search and recommendation pipelines.
The LLM-UP workshop adopts an interactive structure featuring lightning talks, panel discussions, and paper presentations to foster active engagement, cross-disciplinary dialogue, and community-driven agenda setting for this rapidly evolving field.
Time Schedule
Workshop Date: TBA (During SIGIR 2026)
Venue: TBA
Program
The main focus for the workshop is to provide a venue for researchers and practitioners to get together to exchange ideas and do some consolidation on the emerging progress in LLM-powered user profiling: (The exact time schedule for each part will be announced soon.)
Section 1: Welcome and Opening Remarks (30 mins)
Section 2: Invited Keynote 1 & 2 (90 mins)
- We will invite two world-renowned experts to give talks and insights about LLM and recommender systems.
Section 3: Paper Encore (60 mins)
- We will invite authors whose topic-related papers have been accepted to the main conference of SIGIR 2026 to share insights on LLM-powered user profiling. Unlike their formal presentations at the main conference, these talks will focus on interesting phenomena observed in their studies, as well as practical lessons learned and best practices derived from their experiments and real-world applications.
Section 4: Panel Discussion (45 mins)
- The interactive panel discussion will provide young scholars with valuable opportunities to engage directly with senior researchers and practitioners, ask questions, and gain deeper insights into emerging challenges and future directions in the field.
Section 5: Wrap-up and Closing Remarks (10 mins)
Organisers
- Prof. Hongzhi Yin, full professor and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Queensland.
- Dr. Wei Yuan, postdoc at The University of Queensland.
- Mr. Yi Zhang, PhD student at Anhui University.
- Dr. Joel Mackenzie, senior lecturer and DECRA Fellow at The University of Queensland.
- Prof. Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, associate Professor at Griffith University.
- Prof. Wayne Xin Zhao, full professor at Renmin University of China.
- Prof. Yong Li, full professor at Tsinghua University.
- Prof. Lina Yao, full professor at UNSW.