TME-PSR: Time-aware, Multi-interest, and Explanation Personalization for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation aims to predict the next item a user will interact with based on their historical behavior. Advances in Transformers have significantly improved sequential recommendation but are still limited by cost efficiency. Although State Space Models (SSMs) have recently enabled efficient long-range modeling, most existing methods encode each item with a single static contextual role, overlooking the phenomenon of item polysemy. In fact, the same item often plays different semantic roles depending on user context, and existing methods are limited in capturing dynamic behavior across different temporal granularities. In this work, we propose DSRec, a novel dual-interest cross-SSM model that explicitly disentangles item roles across long-term and short-term semantic context. Sequential items are encoded into long-term interest embeddings that capture stable preferences via historical aggregation, and a short-term interest branch that emphasizes local session intent modulated by inter-click time intervals. These interest embeddings are processed through distinct SSM encoders: a full-sequence Mamba for long-term modeling, and a time-modulated SSM that dynamically adjusts state evolution based on temporal gaps. To enable effective cross-granularity alignment, we adopt a residual cross-fusion mechanism that exchanges contextual information between the two branches while preserving semantic independence. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that DSRec outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

Large-scale recommenders increasingly adopt the sequential generative recipe behind large language models, bringing the Transformer into recommendation along with design choices made for text, including Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE). In language models, RoPE encodes token indices for relative position reasoning, but in recommendation, an interaction index records only event order, saying nothing about elapsed time, behavioral cycles across scales, or calendar phase. We revisit this choice and propose T-RoPE, a time-aware RoPE for sequential generative recommendation that replaces index-only rotation with timestamp-based angles, learnable temporal coefficients, multiscale frequency banks, shifted query alignment, and non-stationary key rotation. We prove that standard RoPE, even on timestamps, remains time-translation invariant and cannot distinguish seasonal contexts, and that T-RoPE breaks this invariance while preserving the RoPE interface. Across five public benchmarks, T-RoPE achieves the best result on every metric on every dataset, improving over the strongest baseline by 78--130% in HR@10 on the sparse PixelRec data and 8--12% across metrics on Amazon Books. On an industrial-scale e-commerce dataset with more than 6B interactions, it improves every metric over the HSTU + Time RAB backbone by 13--82%, with ablations attributing the largest gains to multiscale frequencies ($+56\%$ NDCG@50) and non-stationary keys ($+4\%$). An online A/B test in the Shop app yields positive lifts in conversion rate ($+0.33\%$) and order count ($+0.63\%$). We also provide forward and backward algorithms whose added cost is linear in sequence length and head dimension, keeping time-aware RoPE practical for large generative recommenders.

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.