Causality Enhancement for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Wu, Zhibo, Wu, Yunfan, Jiang, Lin, Yang, Ping, Hu, Yao
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Wu, Zhibo
Wu, Yunfan
Jiang, Lin
Yang, Ping
Hu, Yao
author_facet Wu, Zhibo
Wu, Yunfan
Jiang, Lin
Yang, Ping
Hu, Yao
contents Cross-domain recommendation forms a crucial component in recommendation systems. It leverages auxiliary information through source domain tasks or features to enhance target domain recommendations. However, incorporating inconsistent source domain tasks may result in insufficient cross-domain modeling or negative transfer. While incorporating source domain features without considering the underlying causal relationships may limit their contribution to final predictions. Thus, a natural idea is to directly train a cross-domain representation on a causality-labeled dataset from the source to target domain. Yet this direction has been rarely explored, as identifying unbiased real causal labels is highly challenging in real-world scenarios. In this work, we attempt to take a first step in this direction by proposing a causality-enhanced framework, named CE-CDR. Specifically, we first reformulate the cross-domain recommendation as a causal graph for principled guidance. We then construct a causality-aware dataset heuristically. Subsequently, we derive a theoretically unbiased Partial Label Causal Loss to generalize beyond the biased causality-aware dataset to unseen cross-domain patterns, yielding an enriched cross-domain representation, which is then fed into the target model to enhance target-domain recommendations. Theoretical and empirical analyses, as well as extensive experiments, demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of CE-CDR and its general applicability as a model-agnostic plugin. Moreover, it has been deployed in production since April 2025, showing its practical value in real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_14641
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Causality Enhancement for Cross-Domain Recommendation
Wu, Zhibo
Wu, Yunfan
Jiang, Lin
Yang, Ping
Hu, Yao
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Cross-domain recommendation forms a crucial component in recommendation systems. It leverages auxiliary information through source domain tasks or features to enhance target domain recommendations. However, incorporating inconsistent source domain tasks may result in insufficient cross-domain modeling or negative transfer. While incorporating source domain features without considering the underlying causal relationships may limit their contribution to final predictions. Thus, a natural idea is to directly train a cross-domain representation on a causality-labeled dataset from the source to target domain. Yet this direction has been rarely explored, as identifying unbiased real causal labels is highly challenging in real-world scenarios. In this work, we attempt to take a first step in this direction by proposing a causality-enhanced framework, named CE-CDR. Specifically, we first reformulate the cross-domain recommendation as a causal graph for principled guidance. We then construct a causality-aware dataset heuristically. Subsequently, we derive a theoretically unbiased Partial Label Causal Loss to generalize beyond the biased causality-aware dataset to unseen cross-domain patterns, yielding an enriched cross-domain representation, which is then fed into the target model to enhance target-domain recommendations. Theoretical and empirical analyses, as well as extensive experiments, demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of CE-CDR and its general applicability as a model-agnostic plugin. Moreover, it has been deployed in production since April 2025, showing its practical value in real-world applications.
title Causality Enhancement for Cross-Domain Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14641