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Auteurs principaux: Huang, Sirui, Long, Jing, Li, Qian, Xu, Guandong, Li, Qing
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04986
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author Huang, Sirui
Long, Jing
Li, Qian
Xu, Guandong
Li, Qing
author_facet Huang, Sirui
Long, Jing
Li, Qian
Xu, Guandong
Li, Qing
contents Sequential Recommendation (SR) predicts users next interactions by modeling the temporal order of their historical behaviors. Existing approaches, including traditional sequential models and generative recommenders, achieve strong performance but primarily rely on explicit interactions such as clicks or purchases while overlooking item exposures. This ignorance introduces selection bias, where exposed but unclicked items are misinterpreted as disinterest, and exposure bias, where unexposed items are treated as irrelevant. Effectively addressing these biases requires distinguishing between items that were "not exposed" and those that were "not of interest", which cannot be reliably inferred from correlations in historical data. Counterfactual reasoning provides a natural solution by estimating user preferences under hypothetical exposure, and Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) is a common tool for such estimation. However, conventional IPS methods are static and fail to capture the sequential dependencies and temporal dynamics of user behavior. To overcome these limitations, we propose Time aware Inverse Propensity Scoring (TIPS). Unlike traditional static IPS, TIPS effectively accounts for sequential dependencies and temporal dynamics, thereby capturing user preferences more accurately. Extensive experiments show that TIPS consistently enhances recommendation performance as a plug-in for various sequential recommenders. Our code will be publicly available upon acceptance.
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Debiasing Sequential Recommendation with Time-aware Inverse Propensity Scoring
Huang, Sirui
Long, Jing
Li, Qian
Xu, Guandong
Li, Qing
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Sequential Recommendation (SR) predicts users next interactions by modeling the temporal order of their historical behaviors. Existing approaches, including traditional sequential models and generative recommenders, achieve strong performance but primarily rely on explicit interactions such as clicks or purchases while overlooking item exposures. This ignorance introduces selection bias, where exposed but unclicked items are misinterpreted as disinterest, and exposure bias, where unexposed items are treated as irrelevant. Effectively addressing these biases requires distinguishing between items that were "not exposed" and those that were "not of interest", which cannot be reliably inferred from correlations in historical data. Counterfactual reasoning provides a natural solution by estimating user preferences under hypothetical exposure, and Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) is a common tool for such estimation. However, conventional IPS methods are static and fail to capture the sequential dependencies and temporal dynamics of user behavior. To overcome these limitations, we propose Time aware Inverse Propensity Scoring (TIPS). Unlike traditional static IPS, TIPS effectively accounts for sequential dependencies and temporal dynamics, thereby capturing user preferences more accurately. Extensive experiments show that TIPS consistently enhances recommendation performance as a plug-in for various sequential recommenders. Our code will be publicly available upon acceptance.
title Debiasing Sequential Recommendation with Time-aware Inverse Propensity Scoring
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04986