A Systematic Reproducibility Study of BSARec for Sequential Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hutter, Jan, Bakker, Hua Chang, Fris, Stan, Bernardy, Madelon, Liu, Yuanna
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Hutter, Jan
Bakker, Hua Chang
Fris, Stan
Bernardy, Madelon
Liu, Yuanna
author_facet Hutter, Jan
Bakker, Hua Chang
Fris, Stan
Bernardy, Madelon
Liu, Yuanna
contents In sequential recommendation (SR), the self-attention mechanism of Transformer-based models acts as a low-pass filter, limiting their ability to capture high-frequency signals that reflect short-term user interests. To overcome this, BSARec augments the Transformer encoder with a frequency layer that rescales high-frequency components using the Fourier transform. However, the overall effectiveness of BSARec and the roles of its individual components have yet to be systematically validated. We reproduce BSARec and show that it outperforms other SR methods on some datasets. To empirically assess whether BSARec improves performance on high-frequency signals, we propose a metric to quantify user history frequency and evaluate SR methods across different user groups. We compare digital signal processing (DSP) techniques and find that the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) offer only slight improvements over Fourier transforms, and DSP methods provide no clear advantage over simple residual connections. Finally, we explore padding strategies and find that non-constant padding significantly improves recommendation performance, whereas constant padding hinders the frequency rescaler's ability to capture high-frequency signals.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_17442
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Systematic Reproducibility Study of BSARec for Sequential Recommendation
Hutter, Jan
Bakker, Hua Chang
Fris, Stan
Bernardy, Madelon
Liu, Yuanna
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
In sequential recommendation (SR), the self-attention mechanism of Transformer-based models acts as a low-pass filter, limiting their ability to capture high-frequency signals that reflect short-term user interests. To overcome this, BSARec augments the Transformer encoder with a frequency layer that rescales high-frequency components using the Fourier transform. However, the overall effectiveness of BSARec and the roles of its individual components have yet to be systematically validated. We reproduce BSARec and show that it outperforms other SR methods on some datasets. To empirically assess whether BSARec improves performance on high-frequency signals, we propose a metric to quantify user history frequency and evaluate SR methods across different user groups. We compare digital signal processing (DSP) techniques and find that the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) offer only slight improvements over Fourier transforms, and DSP methods provide no clear advantage over simple residual connections. Finally, we explore padding strategies and find that non-constant padding significantly improves recommendation performance, whereas constant padding hinders the frequency rescaler's ability to capture high-frequency signals.
title A Systematic Reproducibility Study of BSARec for Sequential Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17442