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Main Authors: Lu, Ziang, Sang, Lei, Mu, Lin, Zhang, Yiwen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05365
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author Lu, Ziang
Sang, Lei
Mu, Lin
Zhang, Yiwen
author_facet Lu, Ziang
Sang, Lei
Mu, Lin
Zhang, Yiwen
contents Cross-domain Recommendation (CDR) exploits multi-domain correlations to alleviate data sparsity. As a core task within this field, inter-domain recommendation focuses on predicting preferences for users who interact in a source domain but lack behavioral records in a target domain. Existing approaches predominantly rely on overlapping users as anchors for knowledge transfer. In real-world scenarios, overlapping users are often scarce, leaving the vast majority of users with only single-domain interactions. For these users, the absence of explicit alignment signals makes fine-grained preference transfer intrinsically difficult. To address this challenge, this paper proposes Language-Guided Conditional Diffusion for CDR (LGCD), a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) and diffusion models for inter-domain sequential recommendation. Specifically, we leverage LLM reasoning to bridge the domain gap by inferring potential target preferences for single-domain users and mapping them to real items, thereby constructing pseudo-overlapping data. We distinguish between real and pseudo-interaction pathways and introduce additional supervision constraints to mitigate the semantic noise brought by pseudo-interaction. Furthermore, we design a conditional diffusion architecture to precisely guide the generation of target user representations based on source-domain patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LGCD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in inter-domain recommendation tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_05365
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Clues to Generation: Language-Guided Conditional Diffusion for Cross-Domain Recommendation
Lu, Ziang
Sang, Lei
Mu, Lin
Zhang, Yiwen
Information Retrieval
Cross-domain Recommendation (CDR) exploits multi-domain correlations to alleviate data sparsity. As a core task within this field, inter-domain recommendation focuses on predicting preferences for users who interact in a source domain but lack behavioral records in a target domain. Existing approaches predominantly rely on overlapping users as anchors for knowledge transfer. In real-world scenarios, overlapping users are often scarce, leaving the vast majority of users with only single-domain interactions. For these users, the absence of explicit alignment signals makes fine-grained preference transfer intrinsically difficult. To address this challenge, this paper proposes Language-Guided Conditional Diffusion for CDR (LGCD), a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) and diffusion models for inter-domain sequential recommendation. Specifically, we leverage LLM reasoning to bridge the domain gap by inferring potential target preferences for single-domain users and mapping them to real items, thereby constructing pseudo-overlapping data. We distinguish between real and pseudo-interaction pathways and introduce additional supervision constraints to mitigate the semantic noise brought by pseudo-interaction. Furthermore, we design a conditional diffusion architecture to precisely guide the generation of target user representations based on source-domain patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LGCD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in inter-domain recommendation tasks.
title From Clues to Generation: Language-Guided Conditional Diffusion for Cross-Domain Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.05365