On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Mao, Wenyu, Wu, Jiancan, Hu, Guoqing, Yang, Zhengyi, Ji, Wei, Wang, Xiang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Mao, Wenyu
Wu, Jiancan
Hu, Guoqing
Yang, Zhengyi
Ji, Wei
Wang, Xiang
author_facet Mao, Wenyu
Wu, Jiancan
Hu, Guoqing
Yang, Zhengyi
Ji, Wei
Wang, Xiang
contents Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generative sequential recommendation, which typically generate next items to recommend guided by user interaction histories with a multi-step denoising process. However, the multi-step process relies on discrete approximations, introducing discretization error that creates a trade-off between computational efficiency and recommendation effectiveness. To address this trade-off, we propose TA-Rec, a two-stage framework that achieves one-step generation by smoothing the denoising function during pretraining while alleviating trajectory deviation by aligning with user preferences during fine-tuning. Specifically, to improve the efficiency without sacrificing the recommendation performance, TA-Rec pretrains the denoising model with Temporal Consistency Regularization (TCR), enforcing the consistency between the denoising results across adjacent steps. Thus, we can smooth the denoising function to map the noise as oracle items in one step with bounded error. To further enhance effectiveness, TA-Rec introduces Adaptive Preference Alignment (APA) that aligns the denoising process with user preference adaptively based on preference pair similarity and timesteps. Extensive experiments prove that TA-Rec's two-stage objective effectively mitigates the discretization errors-induced trade-off, enhancing both efficiency and effectiveness of diffusion-based recommenders.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_17245
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders
Mao, Wenyu
Wu, Jiancan
Hu, Guoqing
Yang, Zhengyi
Ji, Wei
Wang, Xiang
Information Retrieval
Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generative sequential recommendation, which typically generate next items to recommend guided by user interaction histories with a multi-step denoising process. However, the multi-step process relies on discrete approximations, introducing discretization error that creates a trade-off between computational efficiency and recommendation effectiveness. To address this trade-off, we propose TA-Rec, a two-stage framework that achieves one-step generation by smoothing the denoising function during pretraining while alleviating trajectory deviation by aligning with user preferences during fine-tuning. Specifically, to improve the efficiency without sacrificing the recommendation performance, TA-Rec pretrains the denoising model with Temporal Consistency Regularization (TCR), enforcing the consistency between the denoising results across adjacent steps. Thus, we can smooth the denoising function to map the noise as oracle items in one step with bounded error. To further enhance effectiveness, TA-Rec introduces Adaptive Preference Alignment (APA) that aligns the denoising process with user preference adaptively based on preference pair similarity and timesteps. Extensive experiments prove that TA-Rec's two-stage objective effectively mitigates the discretization errors-induced trade-off, enhancing both efficiency and effectiveness of diffusion-based recommenders.
title On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17245