LatentCRS: A Variational EM Framework for Bridging Semantics and Behavior in LLM-based Conversational Recommendation

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) enable users to articulate explicit and dynamic preferences, overcoming the limitations of fixed templates. However, despite their superior semantic proficiency, LLMs have not yet achieved corresponding improvements in recommendation accuracy. This discrepancy arises from a fundamental representation gap: while LLMs operate within a semantic space, they lack the behavioral grounding needed to encode user behavioral patterns, such as item co-occurrences, which are crucial for accurate recommendations. To address this, we propose a model-agnostic Variational EM Framework for Bridging Semantics and Behavior in LLM-based Conversational Recommendation (LatentCRS). Based on the observation that dialogue and interactions reflect the same latent intent, LatentCRS uses a variational expectation-maximization (EM) procedure, where user intent connects semantic representations with behavioral patterns. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that LatentCRS effectively bridges the representation gap and outperforms baselines.