CARA: Cognitive Adaptive Recommendation Agent

Recent advances in large language models and agent-based recommendation frameworks have introduced new opportunities for more flexible and context-aware recommendation. However, existing methods still largely rely on semantic matching, end-to-end generation, or loosely structured agent workflows, without explicitly modeling how user preferences are processed and translated into final decisions. To address this limitation, we propose CARA, a cognitively inspired recommendation framework that formulates recommendation as a structured decision-making process. The core intuition of CARA is that user decisions are jointly shaped by two complementary mechanisms: intuitive affective preference and deliberate rational evaluation. Accordingly, CARA organizes recommendation into two coordinated stages: candidate filtering, which narrows the search space based on coarse-grained preference constraints, and dual-perspective decision modeling, which captures recommendation decisions through affective and rational judgment. We further introduce a boundary-aware KTO strategy that prioritizes instructions the model can solve occasionally but not consistently, thereby increasing the density of informative preference signals. Extensive experiments on three Amazon Reviews domains show that CARA achieves the best performance on most evaluation metrics, with relative improvements of up to 10.15% over the baseline.