Large language models (LLMs) have significantly reshaped different walks of business. To meet the increasing demands for individualized railway service, we develop LLM4Rail - a novel LLM-augmented railway service consulting platform. Empowered by LLM, LLM4Rail can provide custom modules for ticketing, railway food & drink recommendations, weather information, and chitchat. In LLM4Rail, we propose the iterative "Question-Thought-Action-Observation (QTAO)" prompting framework. It meticulously integrates verbal reasoning with task-oriented actions, that is, reasoning to guide action selection, to effectively retrieve external observations relevant to railway operation and service to generate accurate responses. To provide personalized onboard dining services, we first construct the Chinese Railway Food and Drink (CRFD-25) - a publicly accessible takeout dataset tailored for railway services. CRFD-25 covers a wide range of signature dishes categorized by cities, cuisines, age groups, and spiciness levels. We further introduce an LLM-based zero-shot conversational recommender for railway catering. To address the unconstrained nature of open recommendations, the feature similarity-based post-processing step is introduced to ensure all the recommended items are aligned with CRFD-25 dataset.
@article{arxiv.2507.23377,
title = {LLM4Rail: An LLM-Augmented Railway Service Consulting Platform},
author = {Zhuo Li and Xianghuai Deng and Chiwei Feng and Hanmeng Li and Shenjie Wang and Haichao Zhang and Teng Jia and Conlin Chen and Louis Linchun Wu and Jia Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.23377},
year = {2025}
}