Listwise Preference Diffusion Optimization for User Behavior Trajectories Prediction

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Huang, Hongtao, Huang, Chengkai, Wu, Junda, Yu, Tong, McAuley, Julian, Yao, Lina
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Huang, Hongtao
Huang, Chengkai
Wu, Junda
Yu, Tong
McAuley, Julian
Yao, Lina
author_facet Huang, Hongtao
Huang, Chengkai
Wu, Junda
Yu, Tong
McAuley, Julian
Yao, Lina
contents Forecasting multi-step user behavior trajectories requires reasoning over structured preferences across future actions, a challenge overlooked by traditional sequential recommendation. This problem is critical for applications such as personalized commerce and adaptive content delivery, where anticipating a user's complete action sequence enhances both satisfaction and business outcomes. We identify an essential limitation of existing paradigms: their inability to capture global, listwise dependencies among sequence items. To address this, we formulate User Behavior Trajectory Prediction (UBTP) as a new task setting that explicitly models long-term user preferences. We introduce Listwise Preference Diffusion Optimization (LPDO), a diffusion-based training framework that directly optimizes structured preferences over entire item sequences. LPDO incorporates a Plackett-Luce supervision signal and derives a tight variational lower bound aligned with listwise ranking likelihoods, enabling coherent preference generation across denoising steps and overcoming the independent-token assumption of prior diffusion methods. To rigorously evaluate multi-step prediction quality, we propose the task-specific metric Sequential Match (SeqMatch), which measures exact trajectory agreement, and adopt Perplexity (PPL), which assesses probabilistic fidelity. Extensive experiments on real-world user behavior benchmarks demonstrate that LPDO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, establishing a new benchmark for structured preference learning with diffusion models.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_00530
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Listwise Preference Diffusion Optimization for User Behavior Trajectories Prediction
Huang, Hongtao
Huang, Chengkai
Wu, Junda
Yu, Tong
McAuley, Julian
Yao, Lina
Information Retrieval
Forecasting multi-step user behavior trajectories requires reasoning over structured preferences across future actions, a challenge overlooked by traditional sequential recommendation. This problem is critical for applications such as personalized commerce and adaptive content delivery, where anticipating a user's complete action sequence enhances both satisfaction and business outcomes. We identify an essential limitation of existing paradigms: their inability to capture global, listwise dependencies among sequence items. To address this, we formulate User Behavior Trajectory Prediction (UBTP) as a new task setting that explicitly models long-term user preferences. We introduce Listwise Preference Diffusion Optimization (LPDO), a diffusion-based training framework that directly optimizes structured preferences over entire item sequences. LPDO incorporates a Plackett-Luce supervision signal and derives a tight variational lower bound aligned with listwise ranking likelihoods, enabling coherent preference generation across denoising steps and overcoming the independent-token assumption of prior diffusion methods. To rigorously evaluate multi-step prediction quality, we propose the task-specific metric Sequential Match (SeqMatch), which measures exact trajectory agreement, and adopt Perplexity (PPL), which assesses probabilistic fidelity. Extensive experiments on real-world user behavior benchmarks demonstrate that LPDO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, establishing a new benchmark for structured preference learning with diffusion models.
title Listwise Preference Diffusion Optimization for User Behavior Trajectories Prediction
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00530