Multi-Behavior Recommendation (MBR) leverages multiple user interaction types (e.g., views, clicks, purchases) to enrich preference modeling and alleviate data sparsity issues in traditional single-behavior approaches. However, existing MBR methods face fundamental challenges: they lack principled frameworks to model complex confounding effects from user behavioral habits and item multi-behavior distributions, struggle with effective aggregation of heterogeneous auxiliary behaviors, and fail to align behavioral representations across semantic gaps while accounting for bias distortions. To address these limitations, we propose MCLMR, a novel model-agnostic causal learning framework that can be seamlessly integrated into various MBR architectures. MCLMR first constructs a causal graph to model confounding effects and performs interventions for unbiased preference estimation. Under this causal framework, it employs an Adaptive Aggregation module based on Mixture-of-Experts to dynamically fuse auxiliary behavior information and a Bias-aware Contrastive Learning module to align cross-behavior representations in a bias-aware manner. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MCLMR achieves significant performance improvements across various baseline models, validating its effectiveness and generality. All data and code will be made publicly available. For anonymous review, our code is available at the following the link: https://github.com/gitrxh/MCLMR.
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Sequential recommendation has emerged as a rapidly growing research area in click-through rate prediction due to its ability to capture dynamic user interests from historical interaction sequences. A key challenge, however, lies in modeling long sequences, where users often exhibit pronounced interest shifts, thereby introducing substantial irrelevant or even misleading information into the prediction process. Our empirical analysis corroborates this challenge and further uncovers a recurring behavioral pattern in long sequences, which we term the session hopping phenomenon: while user interests remain stable within a short temporal span, referred to as a session, they often exhibit drastic shifts across sessions and may reappear after multiple sessions. To address this challenge, we propose the Mixture of Sequence (MoS) framework, a model-agnostic MoE approach that achieves accurate predictions by extracting theme-specific and multi-scale subsequences from noisy raw user sequences. First, MoS employs a theme-aware routing mechanism to adaptively learn the latent themes of user sequences and organizes these sequences into multiple coherent subsequences. Each subsequence contains only sessions aligned with a specific theme, thereby effectively filtering out irrelevant or even misleading information introduced by user interest shifts in session hopping. In addition, to alleviate potential information loss caused by subsequence extraction, we introduce a multi-scale fusion mechanism, which leverages three types of experts to capture global sequence characteristics, short-term user behaviors, and theme-specific semantic patterns. Together, these two mechanisms endow MoS with the ability to deliver accurate recommendations from multi-faceted and multi-scale perspectives. Experimental results demonstrate that MoS consistently improves the performance of long-sequence recommendation models while introducing fewer FLOPs compared with other MoE counterparts, providing strong evidence of its excellent balance between utility and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaolin-cs/MoS.
Rapid development of web services has led to an explosion of multimodal content, making multimodal recommender systems (MRSs) vital tools for mitigating information overload. Current MRSs have achieved remarkable progress by incorporating advanced technologies such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these studies still suffer from the semantic shift problem. Generally, item's multimodal content usually contain multiple objects, including target object (core content of item) and auxiliary objects (decorations of item). Existing MRSs overlooked this distinction, failing to prevent auxiliary objects from dominating the representation, leading to biased item representation. To address this issue, we propose a model-agnostic framework ''TargetMR''. Concretely, TargetMR comprises two core modules, including Object Disentangler and Object Identifier. The Object Disentangler decouples item text and image into multiple objects via text syntactic parsing and image segmentation. The Object Identifier performs knowledge distillation based on LLMs to efficiently identify the target text object. It then identifies the target image object through cross-modal semantic evaluation. Moreover, this module refines the representation of image target object by optimizing the semantic correlation. Owing to the model-agnostic design of TargetMR, it can be integrated into various backbone MRSs. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that TargetMR consistently improves the performance of five backbone MRSs, with an average improvement of 12.26%. Our codes are available at https://github.com/gutang-97/TargetMR/.
Collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation has been significantly advanced by integrating Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL). However, (i) random edge perturbations often distort critical structural signals and degrade semantic consistency across augmented views, and (ii) data sparsity hampers the propagation of collaborative signals, limiting generalization. To tackle these challenges, we propose RaDAR (Relation-\allowbreaka ware Diffusion-\allowbreakAsymmetric Graph Contrastive Learning Framework for Recommendation Systems), a novel framework that combines two complementary view generation mechanisms: a graph generative model to capture global structure and a relation-aware denoising model to refine noisy edges. RaDAR introduces three key innovations: (1) asymmetric contrastive learning with global negative sampling to maintain semantic alignment while suppressing noise; (2) diffusion-guided augmentation, which employs progressive noise injection and denoising for enhanced robustness; and (3) relation-aware edge refinement, dynamically adjusting edge weights based on latent node semantics. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate that RaDAR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly under noisy and sparse conditions. Our code is available at our repository.
Sequential recommendation (SRS) has become a core technique for modern platforms, yet the long-tail distribution of user-item interactions poses persistent challenges. Most users interact sparsely, most items receive little exposure, and existing methods struggle with three issues: (i) collaborative sparsity, where interaction signals collapse in the tail; (ii) limited semantic exploitation, since large language models (LLMs) are mainly used for shallow, point-level embeddings; and (iii) head--tail imbalance, where gains in the tail often come at the cost of head performance. We propose Semantic Alignment with Global Embedding for Rec ommendation (SAGE-Rec ), a new framework that explicitly leverages global semantic organization from LLMs for sequential recommendation. On the item side, SAGE-Rec introduces a fuzzy-membership prototype mechanism that enables tail items to inherit features from semantically related head items. On the user side, it performs alignment and distillation across semantically similar users to enrich sparse representations. At the global level, it applies lightweight regularization to balance semantic and collaborative signals, alleviating the head--tail seesaw effect. Extensive experiments across three real-world datasets and backbone models demonstrate that SAGE-Rec consistently preserves head accuracy while substantially improving recommendations for tail users and items. These results highlight global semantic alignment with LLMs as a principled solution to the long-tail dilemma in sequential recommendation. The implementation code is available for easy reproducibility https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/WWW2026_SAGE-LLM.
Multi-criteria recommender systems (MCRSs) are becoming increasingly important in the Web ecosystem, where platforms such as e-commerce sites and review portals allow users to evaluate items from multiple perspectives. By leveraging criterion-level ratings rather than relying solely on overall scores, MCRSs can enhance personalization and more accurately capture user preferences. However, existing multi-criteria recommendation methods often fail to explicitly model user-specific preferences across criteria or to incorporate item–criterion signals into representation learning. To solve these problems, we propose TaTriGR, a Targeting-Aware Tripartite Graph Recommender, which jointly models user–item–criterion interactions in a unified tripartite graph and integrates user-specific criterion weights through targeting mechanisms. Specifically, TaTriGR encodes user–criterion targeting through personalized weights, while incorporating item–criterion performance as an additional channel to enrich item semantics. A lightweight propagation mechanism then diffuses information across the tripartite structure, and a formal score decomposition shows that predictions satisfy fundamental multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) properties. To further reinforce targeting, TaTriGR introduces two auxiliary objectives: Ideal Point Distillation and Lexicographic Consistency, which encourage criterion-consistent user representations and rankings. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TaTriGR, showing relative gains up to 16.1% over the best baseline models. Our implementations are available at https://github.com/nunu1995/TaTriGR.
Online game advertising is a prominent class of Web-mediated interactive services, where understanding and predicting player Lifetime Value (LTV) is a core scientific challenge in Web-scale user modeling, personalization, and digital economy optimization. However, the LTV prediction task poses severe challenges to traditional methods, which include data sparsity and complex distribution characteristics (such as zero-inflation, long tail, multimodal distribution, and cross-game). Existing methods struggle to capture the realistic and complex LTV distributions and exhibit limitations in leveraging cross-game data. We propose the first cross-game dynamic mixture framework with weighted sub-distributions for LTV prediction, DynaMoLTV. DynaMoLTV primarily models complex distributions via a zero-inflated mixture of lognormal (ZIMLN) loss, incorporates a game expert for cross-game data adaptation, employs a hierarchical payment classifier to capture consumption pattern variations, and integrates coarse and fine-grained losses to balance high-value user identification with LTV prediction accuracy. We conduct comprehensive experiments. The results demonstrate that DynaMoLTV achieves the best performance compared to five state-of-the-art baselines across metrics, including paid user identification, high-value user recall and LTV prediction accuracy. Specifically on three gaming datasets, DynaMoLTV reduces RMSE by 0.76%–46.65%, improves AUC by 0.94%–7.11%, and improves Norm-GINI by 0.63%–11.77% compared to five state-of-the-art baselines. DynaMoLTV also significantly improves ranking capabilities, with Recall@50K increasing by 17.64%–577.78%. We validate DynaMoLTV's effectiveness through two online A/B tests: (1) In the scenario of churned user re-engagement, DynaMoLTV increases online LTV by 20.3%-142.6% and downloads by 22.6%-37.7%. (2) In the scenario of online game advertising, DynaMoLTV increases GMV by 1.89% and GMV(ROI) by 27.31%. Our method has been fully deployed in a Web-based online game advertising platform, which ensures that LTV predictions remain personalized for online gaming ad delivery, supporting smarter and more inclusive decision-making on the Web.
Existing multi-behavior recommendations tend to prioritize performance at the expense of explainability, while current explainable methods suffer from limited generalizability due to their reliance on external information. Neuro-Symbolic integration offers a promising avenue for explainability by combining neural networks with symbolic logic rule reasoning. Concurrently, we posit that user behavior chains (e.g., view->cart->buy) inherently embody an endogenous logic suitable for explicit reasoning. However, these observational multiple behaviors are plagued by confounders, causing models to learn spurious correlations. By incorporating causal inference into this Neuro-Symbolic framework, we propose a novel Causal Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning model for Explainable Multi-Behavior Recommendation (CNRE). CNRE operationalizes the endogenous logic by simulating a human-like decision-making process. Specifically, CNRE first employs hierarchical preference propagation to capture heterogeneous cross-behavior dependencies. Subsequently, it models the endogenous logic rule implicit in the user's behavior chain based on preference strength, and adaptively dispatches to the corresponding neural-logic reasoning path (e.g., conjunction, disjunction). This process generates an explainable causal mediator that approximates an ideal state isolated from confounding effects. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets demonstrate CNRE's significant superiority over state-of-the-art baselines, offering multi-level explainability from model design and decision process to recommendation results.
Transformer structures have been widely used in sequential recommender systems (SRS). However, as user interaction histories increase, computational time and memory requirements also grow. This is mainly caused by the standard attention mechanism. Although there exist many methods employing efficient attention and SSM-based models, these approaches struggle to effectively model long sequences and may exhibit unstable performance on short sequences. To address these challenges, we design a sparse attention mechanism, BlossomRec, which models both long-term and short-term user interests through attention computation to achieve stable performance across sequences of varying lengths. Specifically, we categorize user interests in recommendation systems into long-term and short-term interests, and compute them using two distinct sparse attention patterns, with the results combined through a learnable gated output. Theoretically, it significantly reduces the number of interactions participating in attention computation. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that BlossomRec, when integrated with state-of-the-art Transformer-based models, achieves comparable or even superior performance while significantly reducing memory usage, providing strong evidence of BlossomRec's efficiency and effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/WWW2026_BlossomRec.
Dynamic recommender systems (DRSs) model time-varying user preferences and item popularity by sequentially updating low-dimensional representations (i.e., embeddings) of users and items upon each interaction. However, existing approaches often fail to preserve the chronological context of past interactions, overwriting historical signals with the current context and thereby misrepresenting user preferences and item attributes. To address this limitation, we propose a novel DRS framework, named TraceRec, which (1) retraces historical interaction paths and (2) restores chronological context for effective dynamic recommendation. Specifically, TraceRec retraces historical interaction paths via reverse chronological random walks and restores the embeddings of neighbors along these paths to their interaction-time context using a past-projection mechanism. Extensive experiments on six real-world dynamic recommendation datasets demonstrate that TraceRec consistently and significantly outperforms eight competitors, achieving up to 17.05% improvement in Recall@10. The code is available at https://github.com/kmj0792/TraceRec.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a fundamental task in modern recommender systems. In recent years, the integration of large language models (LLMs) has been shown to effectively enhance the performance of traditional CTR methods. However, existing LLM-enhanced methods often require extensive processing of detailed textual descriptions for large-scale instances or user/item entities, leading to substantial computational overhead. To address this challenge, this work introduces LLaCTR, a novel and lightweight LLM-enhanced CTR method that employs a field-level enhancement paradigm. Specifically, LLaCTR first utilizes LLMs to distill crucial and lightweight semantic knowledge from small-scale feature fields through self-supervised field-feature fine-tuning. Subsequently, it leverages this field-level semantic knowledge to enhance both feature representation and feature interactions. In our experiments, we integrate LLaCTR with six representative CTR models across four datasets, demonstrating its superior performance in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency compared to existing LLM-enhanced methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/istarryn/LLaCTR.
User interest is not static but rather a continuously evolving process shaped by diverse interactions across multimodal web platforms. Traditional recommendation systems often model user preferences as discrete snapshots or oversimplified trajectories, failing to capture the nuanced dynamics of interest evolution. In this work, we propose Drifting with Intent, a novel framework that formalizes user interest as a continuous-time stochastic process governed by spatio-temporal coupled stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Our approach fundamentally departs from diffusion-based methods by modeling interest evolution as a directed drift toward meaningful content rather than random diffusion. The core innovation lies in a multi-granularity hypergraph encoder that captures cross-scale user-item interactions, coupled with a unified SDE solver that generates personalized interest trajectories across temporal and relational dimensions. Unlike prior work employing redundant twin networks, we introduce a generative-discriminative co-optimization framework that efficiently balances content generation and recommendation precision within a single parameter space. Extensive experiments across eight diverse datasets demonstrate that our framework not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods in recommendation quality but also provides interpretable interest trajectories that reveal how user preferences evolve across different modalities and time scales. Our work bridges the gap between generative modeling and practical recommendation systems by treating user interest as a purposeful drift rather than a random walk.
Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) seeks to improve user preference modeling by transferring knowledge from multiple domains. Despite the progress made in CDSR, most existing methods rely on overlapping users or items to establish cross-domain correlations-a requirement that rarely holds in real-world settings. The advent of large language models (LLM) and model-merging techniques appears to overcome this limitation by unifying multi-domain data without explicit overlaps. Yet, our empirical study shows that naively training an LLM on combined domains—or simply merging several domain-specific LLMs—often degrades performance relative to a model trained solely on the target domain. To address these challenges, we first experimentally investigate the cause of suboptimal performance in LLM-based cross-domain recommendation and model merging. Building on these insights, we introduce WeaveRec, which cross-trains multiple LoRA modules with source and target domain data in a ''weaving'' fashion, and fuses them via model merging. WeaveRec can be extended to multi-source domain scenarios and notably does not introduce additional inference-time cost in terms of latency or memory. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical guarantee that WeaveRec can reduce the upper bound of the expected error in the target domain. Extensive experiments on single-source, multi-source, and cross-platform cross-domain recommendation scenarios validate that WeaveRec effectively mitigates performance degradation and consistently outperforms baseline approaches in real?world recommendation tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/mertell/WeaveRec.
Negative sampling plays a critical role in sequential recommendation, providing contrastive signals that enable the model to distinguish between preferred and non-preferred items. Existing methods commonly sample items with top prediction scores from a randomly selected candidate set as hard negatives. However, such methods suffer from: (1) early-stage training failure since introducing hard negatives too early; (2) the lack of a global item view due to scoring only a small candidate subset; and (3) the failure of fine-grained control of learning difficulty due to the fixed top-ranking strategy. To address the above challenges, we propose recall and re-ranking of negative samples for sequential recommendation, i.e., R2NS. The proposed method comprises three phases, including warm-start, global recall, and curriculum re-ranking. Firstly, in the warm-start phase, the recommender is trained with naive uniform negative sampling to establish fundamental capability and avoid introducing hard negatives too early. Then, in the global recall phase, candidate negatives are selected from the whole item space through an efficient max-index approximation method to introduce contrastive signals from a global perspective. Finally, in the curriculum re-ranking phase, a curriculum top-ranking strategy is introduced to dynamically adjust the difficulty of negative samples. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets, five sequential recommendation backbone models, and two commonly adopted loss functions demonstrate that R2NS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art negative sampling approaches, validating both the effectiveness and generalization capability of R2NS. Our code is available at https://github.com/Lyz103/R2NS.
Session-based recommendation (SBR), which focuses on next-item prediction for anonymous users based on short-term interaction sequences, has garnered increasing attention from researchers. While graph neural networks (GNNs) have become predominant in modeling complex item transition patterns, our empirical study reveals two critical limitations in existing GNN-based SBR methods. On the one hand, they struggle to differentiate between sessions sharing the same last item, resulting in indistinguishable session representations. On the other hand, the inherent popularity bias in session data leads to the over-recommendation of popular items. Inspired by contrastive learning techniques, this paper presents a unified mitigation framework for Same lAst-item confusion in Graph lEarning (SAGE) for SBR. In SAGE, we first obtain normalized session embeddings on constructed session graphs. We then build positive and negative samples of sessions through dual forward propagations and a novel negative sample selection strategy, followed by calculating contrastive loss. Finally, the enhanced session embeddings are utilized for prediction. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that integrating SAGE with various state-of-the-art GNN-based SBR methods significantly improves their original performances.
Can we design effective recommender systems free from users, IDs, and GNNs? Recommender systems are central to personalized content delivery across domains, with top-K item recommendation being a fundamental task to retrieve the most relevant items from historical interactions. Existing methods rely on entrenched design conventions, often adopted without reconsideration, such as storing per-user embeddings (user-dependent), initializing features from raw IDs (ID-dependent), and employing graph neural networks (GNN-dependent). These dependencies incur several limitations, including high memory costs, cold-start and over-smoothing issues, and poor generalization to unseen interactions. In this work, we propose AlphaFree, a novel recommendation method free from users, IDs, and GNNs. Our main ideas are to infer preferences on-the-fly without user embeddings (user-free), replace raw IDs with language representations (LRs) from pre-trained language models (ID-free), and capture collaborative signals through augmentation with similar items and contrastive learning, without GNNs (GNN-free). Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets show that AlphaFree consistently outperforms its competitors, achieving up to around 40% improvements over non-LR-based methods and up to 5.7% improvements over LR-based methods, while significantly reducing GPU memory usage by up to 69% under high-dimensional LRs.
The prediction objectives of online advertisement ranking models are evolving from probabilistic metrics like conversion rate (CVR) to numerical business metrics like post-click gross merchandise volume (GMV). Unlike the well-studied delayed feedback problem in CVR prediction, delayed feedback modeling for GMV prediction remains unexplored and poses greater challenges, as GMV is a continuous target, and a single click can lead to multiple purchases that cumulatively form the label. To bridge the research gap, we establish TRACE, a GMV prediction benchmark containing complete transaction sequences rising from each user click, which supports delayed feedback modeling in an online streaming manner. Our analysis and exploratory experiments on TRACE reveal two key insights: (1) the rapid evolution of the GMV label distribution necessitates modeling delayed feedback under online streaming training; (2) the label distribution of repurchase samples substantially differs from that of single-purchase samples, highlighting the need for separate modeling. Motivated by these findings, we propose RepurchasE-Aware Dual-branch prEdictoR (READER), a novel GMV modeling paradigm that selectively activates expert parameters according to repurchase predictions produced by a router. Moreover, READER dynamically calibrates the regression target to mitigate under-estimation caused by incomplete labels. Experimental results show that READER yields superior performance on TRACE over baselines, achieving a 2.19% improvement in terms of accuracy. We believe that our study will open up a new avenue for studying online delayed feedback modeling for GMV prediction, and our TRACE benchmark with the gathered insights will facilitate future research and application in this promising direction. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/alimama-tech/OnlineGMV.
Recommenders built upon implicit collaborative filtering are typically trained to distinguish between users' positive and negative preferences. When direct observations of the latter are unavailable, negative training data are constructed with sampling techniques. But since items often exhibit clustering in the latent space, existing methods tend to oversample negatives from dense regions, resulting in homogeneous training data and limited model expressiveness. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel negative sampler with diversity guarantees. To achieve them, our approach first pairs each positive item of a user with one that they have not yet interacted with; this instance, called hard negative, is chosen as the top-scoring item according to the model. Instead of discarding the remaining highly informative items, we store them in a user-specific cache. Next, our diversity-augmented sampler selects a representative subset of negatives from the cache, ensuring its dissimilarity from the corresponding user's hard negatives. Our generator then combines these items with the hard negatives, replacing them to produce more effective (synthetic) negative training data that are informative and diverse. Experiments show that our method consistently leads to superior recommendation quality without sacrificing computational efficiency.
Recommendation systems play a central role in modern services, yet often treat item cover images as static attributes, overlooking their influence on user decisions. We introduce the task of cover recommendation and study few-shot, interaction-free selection using multimodal user interest profiles. To address cold-start and sparsity challenges in traditional methods, we propose Multimodal Cover Recommendation (MCRec), a framework that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for multimodal feature extraction. Our approach includes: (1) a Text-Guided Visual Interest Aggregation network (TGVIA) integrating visual and textual representations; (2) multimodal interest embeddings fused via templated prompts; and (3) a multimodal-driven textual inversion technique enabling training-free generalization to new scenarios. We further propose MCRec+, a fine-tuning variant using hybrid sampling. To support evaluation, we construct three benchmarks and propose two new metrics. Extensive experiments show our methods significantly outperform baselines across datasets, especially with average gains of 3.72% in Recall@1, 1.70% in APMS and 1.25% in MPMS on MCRec. Code and data are publicly available from https://github.com/WeixinZhengRec/MCRec.
With the rapid proliferation of short-video platforms and content-driven social networks, sequential recommendation models capable of accurately capturing user interests have become increasingly crucial. Among these, Transformer-based sequential recommendation models have gained widespread adoption due to their superior ability. The positional encoding (PE) in Transformer architectures serves to incorporate positional information into sequences. However, relying solely on original absolute positional information may be insufficient for sequential recommendation models. In contrast, the dwell time after interactions (i.e., the time intervals between consecutive user interactions) provides a more accurate reflection of users' emotional responses and evolving interests. Despite its significance, this aspect has often been overlooked in existing works. To fully utilize this information, our work introduces an adaptive PE method, termed TSAPE (Temporal-Series-Aware Positional Encoding). This approach introduces an innovative modeling of the sequence of time intervals between user interactions, rather than the numerical values of the intervals themselves, thereby capturing real-time feedback on user interests and integrating it with conventional PE mechanisms. Furthermore, we employ multiple layers of one-dimensional convolutional networks and attention mechanisms to endow the features with adaptive capabilities across various time interval scenarios. This enables TSAPE to more accurately capture sequential positional information at any given moment. By enhancing the sequential order information of interactions, TSAPE significantly improves the accuracy of next-item recommendations. We seamlessly integrated our method into several Transformer-based sequential recommendation models and conducted comparisons with state-of-the-art sequential recommendation approaches and widely-used PE methods. The results demonstrate that the integration of TSAPE consistently outperforms the original backbone models and other SOTA methods. The SASRec model integrated with TSAPE achieves an average improvement of 15.61% across three evaluation metrics on four benchmark datasets. Our code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/rongbo-qi/TSAPE_Rec.