Intent Contrastive Learning Based on Multi-view Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation

Bo Pei, Yingzheng Zhu, Guangjin Wang, Huajuan Duan, Wenya Wu, Fuyong Xu, Yizhao Zhu, Peiyu Liu, Ran Lu


Abstract
Sequential recommendation systems play a key role in modern information retrieval. However, existing intent-related work fails to adequately capture long-term dependencies in user behavior, i.e., the influence of early user behavior on current behavior, and also fails to effectively utilize item relevance. To this end, we propose a novel sequential recommendation framework to overcome the above limitations, called ICMA. Specifically, we combine temporal variability with position encoding that has extrapolation properties to encode sequences, thereby expanding the model’s view of user behavior and capturing long-term user dependencies more effectively. Additionally, we design a multi-view data augmentation method, i.e., based on random data augmentation methods (e.g., crop, mask, and reorder), and further introduce insertion and substitution operations to augment the sequence data from different views by utilizing item relevance. Within this framework, clustering is performed to learn intent distributions, and these learned intents are integrated into the sequential recommendation model via contrastive SSL, which maximizes consistency between sequence views and their corresponding intents. The training process alternates between the Expectation (E) step and the Maximization (M) step. Experiments on three real datasets show that our approach improves by 0.8% to 14.7% compared to most baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.222
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3300–3309
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.222/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bo Pei, Yingzheng Zhu, Guangjin Wang, Huajuan Duan, Wenya Wu, Fuyong Xu, Yizhao Zhu, Peiyu Liu, and Ran Lu. 2025. Intent Contrastive Learning Based on Multi-view Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3300–3309, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Intent Contrastive Learning Based on Multi-view Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation (Pei et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.222.pdf