Ranked by Position: Order Sensitivity as an Exploitable Attack Surface in LLM Listwise Recommenders
Large language models (LLMs) used as listwise rerankers in recommendation systems suffer from position bias when serializing candidate sets into prompts. We show this order sensitivity creates an exploitable attack surface: an attacker can promote a label-0 target into the top-$k$ solely by reordering candidates, without changing item content, labels, or model parameters. We introduce $\mathrm{promo}@k$ to quantify this vulnerability, measuring the fraction of label-0 targets that can be elevated into top-$k$ rankings via permutation. Evaluating across three domains (MovieLens, Amazon Books, and Amazon Fashion), $\mathrm{promo}@5$ reaches up to 0.57 at an attack budget of $R$ = 50 orderin...
| Authors | Ge Zhang, Jingru Cheng, Huiyuan Chen |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 26 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 July 2026 |
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