AsarRec: Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Self-supervised Sequential Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Kaike, Cao, Qi, Sun, Fei, Liu, Xinran, Shen, Huawei, Cheng, Xueqi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Kaike
Cao, Qi
Sun, Fei
Liu, Xinran
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
author_facet Zhang, Kaike
Cao, Qi
Sun, Fei
Liu, Xinran
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
contents Sequential recommender systems have demonstrated strong capabilities in modeling users' dynamic preferences and capturing item transition patterns. However, real-world user behaviors are often noisy due to factors such as human errors, uncertainty, and behavioral ambiguity, which can lead to degraded recommendation performance. To address this issue, recent approaches widely adopt self-supervised learning (SSL), particularly contrastive learning, by generating perturbed views of user interaction sequences and maximizing their mutual information to improve model robustness. However, these methods heavily rely on their pre-defined static augmentation strategies~(where the augmentation type remains fixed once chosen) to construct augmented views, leading to two critical challenges: (1) the optimal augmentation type can vary significantly across different scenarios; (2) inappropriate augmentations may even degrade recommendation performance, limiting the effectiveness of SSL. To overcome these limitations, we propose an adaptive augmentation framework. We first unify existing basic augmentation operations into a unified formulation via structured transformation matrices. Building on this, we introduce AsarRec (Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Sequential Recommendation), which learns to generate transformation matrices by encoding user sequences into probabilistic transition matrices and projecting them into hard semi-doubly stochastic matrices via a differentiable Semi-Sinkhorn algorithm. To ensure that the learned augmentations benefit downstream performance, we jointly optimize three objectives: diversity, semantic invariance, and informativeness. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets under varying noise levels validate the effectiveness of AsarRec, demonstrating its superior robustness and consistent improvements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_14047
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AsarRec: Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Self-supervised Sequential Recommendation
Zhang, Kaike
Cao, Qi
Sun, Fei
Liu, Xinran
Shen, Huawei
Cheng, Xueqi
Information Retrieval
Sequential recommender systems have demonstrated strong capabilities in modeling users' dynamic preferences and capturing item transition patterns. However, real-world user behaviors are often noisy due to factors such as human errors, uncertainty, and behavioral ambiguity, which can lead to degraded recommendation performance. To address this issue, recent approaches widely adopt self-supervised learning (SSL), particularly contrastive learning, by generating perturbed views of user interaction sequences and maximizing their mutual information to improve model robustness. However, these methods heavily rely on their pre-defined static augmentation strategies~(where the augmentation type remains fixed once chosen) to construct augmented views, leading to two critical challenges: (1) the optimal augmentation type can vary significantly across different scenarios; (2) inappropriate augmentations may even degrade recommendation performance, limiting the effectiveness of SSL. To overcome these limitations, we propose an adaptive augmentation framework. We first unify existing basic augmentation operations into a unified formulation via structured transformation matrices. Building on this, we introduce AsarRec (Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Sequential Recommendation), which learns to generate transformation matrices by encoding user sequences into probabilistic transition matrices and projecting them into hard semi-doubly stochastic matrices via a differentiable Semi-Sinkhorn algorithm. To ensure that the learned augmentations benefit downstream performance, we jointly optimize three objectives: diversity, semantic invariance, and informativeness. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets under varying noise levels validate the effectiveness of AsarRec, demonstrating its superior robustness and consistent improvements.
title AsarRec: Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Self-supervised Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14047