Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2610.34192

MIDA: Multi-Interest Decoding with Adaptive Aggregation for Session-based Recommendation

Linjiang Guo·Nitin Bisht·Shiqing Wu·Guandong Xu
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Session-based recommendation (SBR) infers user interest from limited interaction sequences, yet current models show a consistent performance drop when longer histories are available. This degradation is associated with decoder designs that overemphasize recent items while underutilizing distant, yet semantically relevant, interactions, leading to poor modeling of long-range dependencies and multi-interest behaviors. To address this challenge, we introduce MIDA (Multi-Interest Decoding with Adaptive Aggregation for Session-based Recommendation), a lightweight and encoder-agnostic framework that provides a reformulation of the decoding stage. The central design principle is a two-space decoupling: clustering operates on raw item embeddings so that semantic groupings are not distorted by encoder-learned relational biases; encoder outputs are reserved for aggregation, where sequential context remains intact. Concretely, MIDA (i) employs differentiable multi-interest clustering on raw embeddings, preserving semantic structure that encoder representations would otherwise obscure, and (ii) fuses stability and plasticity branches through a gate conditioned on average cluster size, so that the inferred clustering structure directly governs aggregation behavior through a structural coupling across the two stages. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that MIDA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with meaningful accuracy improvements while remaining computationally practical.

Explore related subjects

cs.IR

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Linjiang Guo, Nitin Bisht, Shiqing Wu, Guandong Xu. 2026-10-25. MIDA: Multi-Interest Decoding with Adaptive Aggregation for Session-based Recommendation. https://doi.org/10.1109/tkde.2026.3740693

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

An Interpretable CF-RL-TOPSIS Fusion Model for Skills-Aware Talent Recommendation

Effective skills-aware talent recommendation must balance behavioral transition patterns, trajectory-sensitive adaptation, and inspectable occupation-level criteria. Evidence from public benchmarks on how these signals interact, however, remains limited. This study proposes CF-RL-TOPSIS, an interpretable late-fusion model that integrates a transition-aware collaborative branch, a compact reinforcement-style occupation-family bandit, and an entropy-weighted TOPSIS branch constructed from six semantic proxies; the validation-selected fusion coefficients remain auditable. The model is evaluated on two frozen public ICT talent-history benchmarks, JobHop and Karrierewege, using repeated chronological top-5 ranking and paired Wilcoxon tests. On JobHop the full hybrid attains NDCG@5 = 0.3040 +/- 0.0073 and significantly surpasses repeat-last, item Markov, transition-aware collaborative filtering, the CF+TOPSIS hybrid, GRU4Rec, and SASRec (p <= 0.0039 across planned comparisons). On Karrierewege the hybrid remains competitive but does not significantly exceed the strongest Markov baseline, revealing a persistence-dominated setting in which the bandit branch appropriately shrinks to near-zero weight. Proxy-sensitivity, family-level deep Q-network, and runtime checks support this interpretation, and a worked user-level case shows how branch scores, criterion weights, and rank shifts can be inspected for an individual recommendation. The contribution is not a benchmark-agnostic superiority claim, but a reproducible account of the conditions under which transparent late fusion adds value beyond simple continuation heuristics. In semantically rich, non-saturating talent-history regimes the three branches reinforce one another; in persistence-dominated regimes the same architecture remains competitive through its collaborative backbone, with the adaptive branch correctly inactive.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

UniRec: Cross-stage Multi-Task Fusion with Preference Optimization for Cascaded Recommender Systems

Industrial recommender systems use cascaded stages with different candidate spaces, data distributions, and latency constraints. Each stage include multi-objective prediction and multi-task fusion (MTF) modules. Existing MTF methods typically design and optimize the fusion module independently for each stage, which can lead to inconsistent preferences across stages. Although cross-stage coordination methods have been proposed, they mainly transfer supervision to upstream scoring models rather than jointly optimizing the fusion modules. We propose UniRec, a Unified Cross-stage Recommendation Fusion framework that jointly optimizes pre-ranking and ranking fusion agents. UniRec employs a coupled dual-agent architecture with partially shared embeddings and stage-specific fusion functions. It further introduces Dual-Axis Preference Optimization to combine stage-local preferences with downstream-to-upstream preference transfer. To enable stable and efficient cross-stage training, we address two practical challenges: reward-induced distribution drift and the computational cost of pairwise preference learning. Extensive offline and online experiments on a production short-video system demonstrate consistent gains over single-stage fusion and cross-stage coordination baselines. In a nine-week online A/B test, UniRec improves total watch time by $0.675\%$ and app usage time by $0.616\%$, and active users by $0.189\%$, and has been fully deployed in production.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Geometric Gain Graph: Zero-Token Graph Construction for Multi-Hop RAG

Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems struggle with multi-hop reasoning due to a fundamental inability to balance relevance and novelty. Traditional dense retrievers are constrained by surface-level matching, falling into a homogenized "Similarity Trap". Conversely, emerging Graph RAGs attempt to explore novel documents via heuristic entity extraction, but they introduce prohibitive Large Language Model (LLM) overhead and easily drift into off-topic "Novelty Traps". To fundamentally resolve this contradiction, we propose Geometric Gain Graph (G$^3$RAG), the novel zero-token graph construction paradigm for RAG. G$^3$RAG completely discards the expensive heuristic extraction by LLMs, aiming instead to directly quantify the information gain between nodes through the native document feature space. To this end, we designed a concise edge weight criterion, $\cosθ\cdot \sinθ$, which naturally maps the trade-off between relevance and novelty into a geometric measurement of directional consistency and orthogonality in the vector space, thereby driving the token-free topological construction of the graph. Furthermore, we introduce a topological penalty to suppress the excessive connectivity of high-frequency hubs, forcing the transient diffusion process toward long-tail peripheral nodes that carry critical indirect evidence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, while entirely eliminating LLM token costs during graph construction, G$^3$RAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art Graph RAG baselines on complex multi-hop QA benchmarks. The code is available at: https://github.com/deeplearning-LI/G3RAG

cs.IR↗