IPSRM: An intent perceived sequential recommendation model

Abstract

Objectives:

Sequential recommendation aims to recommend items that are relevant to users’ interests based on their existing interaction sequences. Current models lack in capturing users’ latent intentions and do not sufficiently consider sequence information during the modeling of users and items. Additionally, noise in user interaction sequences can affect the model’s optimization process.

Methods:

This paper introduces an intent perceived sequential recommendation model (IPSRM). IPSRM employs the generalized expectation–maximization (EM) framework, alternating between learning sequence representations and optimizing the model to better capture the underlying intentions of user interactions. Specifically, IPSRM maps unlabeled behavioral sequences into frequency domain filtering and random Gaussian distribution space. These mappings reduce the impact of noise and improve the learning of user behavior representations. Through clustering process, IPSRM captures users’ potential interaction intentions and incorporates them as one of the supervisions into the contrastive self-supervised learning process to guide the optimization process.

Results:

Experimental results on four standard datasets demonstrate the superiority of IPSRM. Comparative experiments also verify that IPSRM exhibits strong robustness under cold start and noisy interaction conditions.

Conclusions:

Capturing latent user intentions, integrating intention-based supervision into model optimization, and mitigating noise in sequential modeling significantly enhance the performance of sequential recommendation systems.