Flow Matching for Collaborative Filtering

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Liu, Chengkai, Zhang, Yangtian, Wang, Jianling, Ying, Rex, Caverlee, James
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866908519397064704
author Liu, Chengkai
Zhang, Yangtian
Wang, Jianling
Ying, Rex
Caverlee, James
author_facet Liu, Chengkai
Zhang, Yangtian
Wang, Jianling
Ying, Rex
Caverlee, James
contents Generative models have shown great promise in collaborative filtering by capturing the underlying distribution of user interests and preferences. However, existing approaches struggle with inaccurate posterior approximations and misalignment with the discrete nature of recommendation data, limiting their expressiveness and real-world performance. To address these limitations, we propose FlowCF, a novel flow-based recommendation system leveraging flow matching for collaborative filtering. We tailor flow matching to the unique challenges in recommendation through two key innovations: (1) a behavior-guided prior that aligns with user behavior patterns to handle the sparse and heterogeneous user-item interactions, and (2) a discrete flow framework to preserve the binary nature of implicit feedback while maintaining the benefits of flow matching, such as stable training and efficient inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowCF achieves state-of-the-art recommendation accuracy across various datasets with the fastest inference speed, making it a compelling approach for real-world recommender systems. The code is available at https://github.com/chengkai-liu/FlowCF.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_07303
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Flow Matching for Collaborative Filtering
Liu, Chengkai
Zhang, Yangtian
Wang, Jianling
Ying, Rex
Caverlee, James
Information Retrieval
Generative models have shown great promise in collaborative filtering by capturing the underlying distribution of user interests and preferences. However, existing approaches struggle with inaccurate posterior approximations and misalignment with the discrete nature of recommendation data, limiting their expressiveness and real-world performance. To address these limitations, we propose FlowCF, a novel flow-based recommendation system leveraging flow matching for collaborative filtering. We tailor flow matching to the unique challenges in recommendation through two key innovations: (1) a behavior-guided prior that aligns with user behavior patterns to handle the sparse and heterogeneous user-item interactions, and (2) a discrete flow framework to preserve the binary nature of implicit feedback while maintaining the benefits of flow matching, such as stable training and efficient inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FlowCF achieves state-of-the-art recommendation accuracy across various datasets with the fastest inference speed, making it a compelling approach for real-world recommender systems. The code is available at https://github.com/chengkai-liu/FlowCF.
title Flow Matching for Collaborative Filtering
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07303