This study presents Poison-RAG, a framework for adversarial data poisoning
attacks targeting retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based recommender
systems. Poison-RAG manipulates item metadata, such as tags and descriptions,
to influence recommendation outcomes. Using item metadata generated through a
large language model (LLM) and embeddings derived via the OpenAI API, we
explore the impact of adversarial poisoning attacks on provider-side, where
attacks are designed to promote long-tail items and demote popular ones. Two
attack strategies are proposed: local modifications, which personalize tags for
each item using BERT embeddings, and global modifications, applying uniform
tags across the dataset. Experiments conducted on the MovieLens dataset in a
black-box setting reveal that local strategies improve manipulation
effectiveness by up to 50\%, while global strategies risk boosting already
popular items. Results indicate that popular items are more susceptible to
attacks, whereas long-tail items are harder to manipulate. Approximately 70\%
of items lack tags, presenting a cold-start challenge; data augmentation and
synthesis are proposed as potential defense mechanisms to enhance RAG-based
systems' resilience. The findings emphasize the need for robust metadata
management to safeguard recommendation frameworks. Code and data are available
at https://github.com/atenanaz/Poison-RAG.