Multimodal Fusion And Sparse Attention-based Alignment Model for Long Sequential Recommendation

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Hauptverfasser: Fu, Yongrui, Liu, Jian, Li, Tao, Wu, Zonggang, Qin, Shouke, Liu, Hanmeng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Fu, Yongrui
Liu, Jian
Li, Tao
Wu, Zonggang
Qin, Shouke
Liu, Hanmeng
author_facet Fu, Yongrui
Liu, Jian
Li, Tao
Wu, Zonggang
Qin, Shouke
Liu, Hanmeng
contents Recent advances in multimodal recommendation enable richer item understanding, while modeling users' multi-scale interests across temporal horizons has attracted growing attention. However, effectively exploiting multimodal item sequences and mining multi-grained user interests to substantially bridge the gap between content comprehension and recommendation remain challenging. To address these issues, we propose MUFASA, a MUltimodal Fusion And Sparse Attention-based Alignment model for long sequential recommendation. Our model comprises two core components. First, the Multimodal Fusion Layer (MFL) leverages item titles as a cross-genre semantic anchor and is trained with a joint objective of four tailored losses that promote: (i) cross-genre semantic alignment, (ii) alignment to the collaborative space for recommendation, (iii) preserving the similarity structure defined by titles and preventing modality representation collapse, and (iv) distributional regularization of the fusion space. This yields high-quality fused item representations for further preference alignment. Second, the Sparse Attention-guided Alignment Layer (SAL) scales to long user-behavior sequences via a multi-granularity sparse attention mechanism, which incorporates windowed attention, block-level attention, and selective attention, to capture user interests hierarchically and across temporal horizons. SAL explicitly models both the evolution of coherent interest blocks and fine-grained intra-block variations, producing robust user and item representations. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks show that MUFASA consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, online A/B tests demonstrate significant gains in production, confirming MUFASA's effectiveness in leveraging multimodal cues and accurately capturing diverse user preferences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_09664
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Fusion And Sparse Attention-based Alignment Model for Long Sequential Recommendation
Fu, Yongrui
Liu, Jian
Li, Tao
Wu, Zonggang
Qin, Shouke
Liu, Hanmeng
Information Retrieval
Recent advances in multimodal recommendation enable richer item understanding, while modeling users' multi-scale interests across temporal horizons has attracted growing attention. However, effectively exploiting multimodal item sequences and mining multi-grained user interests to substantially bridge the gap between content comprehension and recommendation remain challenging. To address these issues, we propose MUFASA, a MUltimodal Fusion And Sparse Attention-based Alignment model for long sequential recommendation. Our model comprises two core components. First, the Multimodal Fusion Layer (MFL) leverages item titles as a cross-genre semantic anchor and is trained with a joint objective of four tailored losses that promote: (i) cross-genre semantic alignment, (ii) alignment to the collaborative space for recommendation, (iii) preserving the similarity structure defined by titles and preventing modality representation collapse, and (iv) distributional regularization of the fusion space. This yields high-quality fused item representations for further preference alignment. Second, the Sparse Attention-guided Alignment Layer (SAL) scales to long user-behavior sequences via a multi-granularity sparse attention mechanism, which incorporates windowed attention, block-level attention, and selective attention, to capture user interests hierarchically and across temporal horizons. SAL explicitly models both the evolution of coherent interest blocks and fine-grained intra-block variations, producing robust user and item representations. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks show that MUFASA consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, online A/B tests demonstrate significant gains in production, confirming MUFASA's effectiveness in leveraging multimodal cues and accurately capturing diverse user preferences.
title Multimodal Fusion And Sparse Attention-based Alignment Model for Long Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09664