ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation

Recent advances in multimodal recommenders excel at feature fusion but remain opaque and inefficient decision-makers, lacking explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty. To address this, we introduce ReasonRec, a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline: Observe, via a pretrained Vision-Language Model (VLM) encoder; Deliberate, by formulating recommendation as chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning tasks and explicitly quantifying prediction uncertainty through an evidence-horizon-aware curriculum; and Act, through dynamic delegation of uncertain or challenging queries to lightweight classical recommendation models. Specifically, we propose a reasoning-aware visual instruction tuning strategy that systematically transforms diverse recommendation tasks into unified CoT prompts, enabling the VLM to explicitly articulate intermediate decision steps. Additionally, our evidence-horizon curriculum progressively enhances the reasoning complexity to better handle cold-start and long-tail user scenarios, significantly boosting model generalization. Furthermore, the uncertainty-guided delegation mechanism empowers the agent to assess its own confidence, strategically allocating computational resources to optimize both recommendation accuracy and inference efficiency. Comprehensive experiments on four standard recommendation tasks (sequential recommendation, direct recommendation, CTR prediction, and explanation generation) across five real-world datasets demonstrate that ReasonRec achieves over 30% relative improvement in key ranking metrics (e.g., HR@5, NDCG@5) compared to state-of-the-art multimodal recommenders. Crucially, ReasonRec substantially reduces inference latency by dynamically delegating up to 35% of queries to efficient sub-models without compromising accuracy. Extensive ablation studies further confirm that each proposed reasoning and planning mechanism individually contributes substantially to ReasonRec's overall effectiveness. Collectively, our results illustrate a clear pathway towards interpretable, adaptive, and efficient multimodal recommendation through explicit reasoning and agentic design.