MOSAIC: Multi-Domain Orthogonal Session Adaptive Intent Capture for Prescient Recommendations
Organizations: Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Laboratory (LIMA), Faculty of Science and Technology, Chadli Bendjedid University, P.O. Box 73, El Tarf 36000, Algeria · Electro-Mechanical Systems Laboratory (LSEM), Faculty of Technology, Badji Mokhtar University, P.O. Box 12, Annaba 23000, Algeria · Mathematical Modeling and Numerical Simulation Laboratory (LAM2SIN), Faculty of Technology, Badji Mokhtar University, P.O. Box 12, Annaba 23000, Algeria
Abstract
Capturing user intent across heterogeneous behavioral domains stands as a fundamental challenge in session-based recommender systems. Yet, existing multi-domain approaches frequently fail to isolate the distinct contribution of cross-domain interactions from those arising within individual domains, limiting their ability to build rich and transferable user representations. In this work, we propose MOSAIC, a Multi-Domain Orthogonal Session Adaptive Intent Capture framework that explicitly factorizes user preferences into three orthogonal components: domain-specific, domain-common, and cross-sequence-exclusive representations. Our approach employs a triple-encoder architecture, where each encoder is dedicated to one preference type, enforced through domain masking objectives and adversarial training via a gradient reversal layer. Representational alignment and mutual independence constraints are jointly optimized to ensure clean preference separation. Additionally, a dynamic gating mechanism modulates the relative contribution of each component at every timestep, yielding a unified and temporally adaptive session-level user representation. We conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale real-world benchmarks spanning multiple domains and interaction types. The ablation study validates that each component domain-specific encoding, domain-common modeling, cross-sequence representation, and dynamic gating contributes meaningfully to the overall performance. Experimental results demonstrate that MOSAIC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recommendation accuracy, while simultaneously providing interpretable insights into the interplay between domain-specific and cross-domain preference signals. These findings highlight the potential of orthogonal preference decomposition as a principled strategy for next-generation multi-domain recommender systems.
Figures & tables
| Dataset | Domain | #Users | #Items | #Interactions | Avg. len. | Density |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Movie–Book | Movie | 18,032 | 64,591 | 1,041,294 | 57.7 | 0.089% |
| Book | 18,032 | 253,841 | 1,584,033 | 87.8 | 0.034% | |
| Amazon Movie–Music | Movie | 10,547 | 50,762 | 681,430 | 64.6 | 0.127% |
| Music | 10,547 | 73,839 | 456,872 | 43.3 | 0.059% | |
| Douban Movie–Book–Music | Movie | 2,712 | 33,519 | 1,278,401 | 471.3 | 1.407% |
| Book | 2,712 | 22,347 | 792,062 | 292.0 | 1.308% |
| Amazon Movie–Book (Movie) | Amazon Movie–Music (Movie) | Douban Movie–Book (Movie) | ||||||||||||||||
| Method | HR@5 | HR@10 | HR@20 | N@5 | N@10 | N@20 | HR@5 | HR@10 | HR@20 | N@5 | N@10 | N@20 | HR@5 | HR@10 | HR@20 | N@5 | N@10 | N@20 |
| GRU4Rec | 0.0412 | 0.0683 | 0.1042 | 0.0271 | 0.0361 | 0.0470 | 0.0387 | 0.0641 | 0.0973 | 0.0254 | 0.0339 | 0.0440 | 0.0631 | 0.1023 | 0.1561 | 0.0418 | 0.0553 | 0.0719 |
| SASRec | 0.0524 | 0.0851 | 0.1293 | 0.0347 | 0.0459 | 0.0596 | 0.0491 | 0.0793 | 0.1197 | 0.0325 | 0.0428 | 0.0554 | 0.0754 | 0.1212 | 0.1843 | 0.0501 | 0.0659 | 0.0857 |
| BERT4Rec | 0.0558 | 0.0902 | 0.1372 | 0.0370 | 0.0490 | 0.0636 | 0.0519 | 0.0836 | 0.1261 | 0.0344 | 0.0453 | 0.0586 | 0.0802 | 0.1284 | 0.1947 | 0.0533 | 0.0700 | 0.0908 |
| MacridVAE | 0.0487 | 0.0796 | 0.1214 | 0.0321 | 0.0427 | 0.0556 | 0.0452 | 0.0738 | 0.1121 | 0.0299 | 0.0397 | 0.0515 | 0.0713 | 0.1148 | 0.1743 | 0.0473 | 0.0624 | 0.0811 |
| CMVCDR | 0.0601 | 0.0967 | 0.1466 | 0.0397 | 0.0523 | 0.0679 | 0.0563 | 0.0904 | 0.1367 | 0.0372 | 0.0490 | 0.0635 | 0.0861 | 0.1374 | 0.2075 | 0.0573 | 0.0750 | 0.0974 |
| Variant | HR@10 | HR | NDCG@10 | NDCG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MOSAIC (full) | 0.1343 | — | 0.0696 | — |
| w/o Spe | 0.1251 | 0.0639 | ||
| w/o Com | 0.1274 | 0.0651 | ||
| w/o Cross | 0.1187 | 0.0601 | ||
| w/o GRL | 0.1292 | 0.0665 | ||
| w/o Align | 0.1306 | 0.0674 |
| Hyperparameter | Values tested | NDCG@10 range |
| 0.001, 0.01, 0.1 , 1.0 | 0.0641 – 0.0696 | |
| 0.001, 0.01 , 0.1, 1.0 | 0.0658 – 0.0696 | |
| 0.01, 0.1 , 0.5, 1.0 | 0.0663 – 0.0696 | |
| 0.01, 0.1 , 0.5, 1.0 | 0.0657 – 0.0696 | |
| 0.1, 0.5, 1.0 , 2.0, 5.0 | 0.0638 – 0.0696 | |
| 64, 128 , 256 | 0.0651 – 0.0701 |
Recommender Systems
Recommender systems predict and rank items for people using interaction histories, content, context, and feedback.
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