Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Sequential Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Bai, Yimeng, Zhang, Yang, Ding, Sihao, Ruan, Shaohui, Yao, Han, Guan, Danhui, Feng, Fuli, Chua, Tat-Seng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Bai, Yimeng
Zhang, Yang
Ding, Sihao
Ruan, Shaohui
Yao, Han
Guan, Danhui
Feng, Fuli
Chua, Tat-Seng
author_facet Bai, Yimeng
Zhang, Yang
Ding, Sihao
Ruan, Shaohui
Yao, Han
Guan, Danhui
Feng, Fuli
Chua, Tat-Seng
contents Diffusion models, known for their strong generative capability derived from iterative noising and denoising processes, have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for sequential recommendation. To incorporate user history for personalization, existing methods typically follow a history-guided denoising paradigm inspired by text-guided image generation, where target item representations are reconstructed from Gaussian noise conditioned on user historical interactions. However, this design remains fundamentally anchored to an "item $\leftrightarrow$ noise" formulation, introducing an additional noise-reconstruction burden that may distract the model from capturing user-specific preference structures. Motivated by this limitation, we revisit diffusion-based sequential recommendation from a preference-centric perspective and adopt a preference bridging design that enables a direct "item $\leftrightarrow$ history" transition instead of relying on Gaussian noise. Based on this idea, we propose Brownian Bridge Diffusion Recommendation (BBDRec), which leverages the Brownian bridge process to construct a structured diffusion trajectory between target items and user historical representations, thereby better aligning diffusion modeling with the intrinsic nature of recommendation. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets show that BBDRec consistently outperforms representative sequential and diffusion-based recommendation baselines. The implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/baiyimeng/BBDRec.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06121
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Sequential Recommendation
Bai, Yimeng
Zhang, Yang
Ding, Sihao
Ruan, Shaohui
Yao, Han
Guan, Danhui
Feng, Fuli
Chua, Tat-Seng
Information Retrieval
Diffusion models, known for their strong generative capability derived from iterative noising and denoising processes, have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for sequential recommendation. To incorporate user history for personalization, existing methods typically follow a history-guided denoising paradigm inspired by text-guided image generation, where target item representations are reconstructed from Gaussian noise conditioned on user historical interactions. However, this design remains fundamentally anchored to an "item $\leftrightarrow$ noise" formulation, introducing an additional noise-reconstruction burden that may distract the model from capturing user-specific preference structures. Motivated by this limitation, we revisit diffusion-based sequential recommendation from a preference-centric perspective and adopt a preference bridging design that enables a direct "item $\leftrightarrow$ history" transition instead of relying on Gaussian noise. Based on this idea, we propose Brownian Bridge Diffusion Recommendation (BBDRec), which leverages the Brownian bridge process to construct a structured diffusion trajectory between target items and user historical representations, thereby better aligning diffusion modeling with the intrinsic nature of recommendation. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets show that BBDRec consistently outperforms representative sequential and diffusion-based recommendation baselines. The implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/baiyimeng/BBDRec.
title Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06121