Abstract
Evaluating natural language explanations in recommender systems is essential for fostering user trust, transparency, and engagement. However, existing evaluation approaches like human evaluations, while accurate, are resource-intensive and impractical at the scale required by modern recommendation platforms. Also, automated methods using single-agent LLMs suffer from prompt sensitivity and inconsistent outputs. To address these challenges, we propose MAREval, a structured multi-agent framework for evaluating recommendation explanations using large language models. MAREval orchestrates (i) a planner agent that uses a novel Chain of Debate (CoD) prompting strategy to coordinate agent roles and enforce logically consistent evaluation plans; (ii) a moderator agent that regulates discussions by mitigating prompt drift; and (iii) an arbitrator agent that aggregates outputs from multiple evaluation rounds and (iv) a Monte Carlo sampling method, improving robustness and alignment with human judgment. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on both public (TopicalChat) and proprietary recommendation datasets, demonstrating that MAREval outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Comprehensive experiments on a public benchmark and a proprietary e-commerce dataset show that MAREval improves alignment with human judgments over strong singleand multi-agent baselines. Stability analyses indicate substantially lower variability across repeated trials. In a large human-annotation gate, MAREval meets production quality thresholds where prior evaluators fall short, and online A/B testing demonstrates statistically significant improvements in engagement and revenue metrics. These results establish MAREval as a scalable and reliable solution for human-aligned evaluation of recommendation explanations in real-world systems
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36389
