Rethinking Convolutional Networks for Attribute-Aware Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation aims to predict users' next interaction with items by analyzing their historical behavior. However, the limited quality of item representations remains a critical bottleneck. While pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can provide rich semantic representations, existing approaches only rely on static encoding of fixed attributes, overlooking the crucial role of target audiences in defining item identity. Moreover, the semantic space struggles to reflect actual user behavior, resulting in a significant gap between semantic representations and behavioral patterns. To address these limitations, we propose GenAIR, a general framework that empowers sequential recommendation with Generative Archetype-grounded Item Representations. Specifically, we first leverage an LLM to analyze item metadata and infer textual description of the Archetype, which represents the conceptual profile of the item's ideal target audience. We then extract the corresponding embeddings in a single forward pass. Further, to ground these generative archetypes in real-world behavior, we introduce a behavioral calibration objective, which explicitly incorporates behavioral signals from actual interactions. This objective adjusts the structure of the embedding space to reflect empirical patterns. GenAIR enables seamless integration with most existing models while maintaining high efficiency. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GenAIR significantly improves the performance of various sequential recommendation models and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baseline approaches. Implementation codes are available at https://github.com/AI-Santiago/GenAIR.

Sequential recommender systems typically infer user preferences through single-pass encoding of interaction histories without iterative refinement, relying on increasingly deep architectures to capture complex patterns. In this work, we revisit sequential recommendation from a recursive inference perspective: can user preferences be modeled as a persistent latent state that is recursively refined? We propose RecRec (Recursive Recommendation), a lightweight model that maintains a compact latent state and updates it through a shared recursive module conditioned on interaction evidence. Unlike prior recursive models, RecRec introduces an evidence-anchored correction mechanism that stabilizes refinement by grounding each update in the original interaction context, preventing semantic drift during deep recursive reasoning. Experiments on three benchmark datasets under standard evaluation protocols show that RecRec matches or outperforms state-of-the-art sequential, graph-based, and reasoning-enhanced recommenders while using only 3.9M to 14M parameters. Ablation studies demonstrate that both recursive refinement and the evidence-anchored correction gate contribute significantly to performance, highlighting the effectiveness of recursive latent inference as a scalable alternative to deeper or language-based architectures. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RecRec-6B67/README.md.

Sequence learning has emerged as the promising paradigm in recommendation systems, surpassing traditional Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRM) by capturing the temporal nuances of user behavior. However, current state-of-the-art architectures operate under a limiting analogy: they treat user history as a monolithic chronological sequence like a sentence in a Large Language Model (LLM). We observe a fundamental divergence between natural language and recommendation data: unlike the linear, logical flow of text, user history is inherently multi-faceted. A user's journey is a fragmented reflection of diverse interests, resulting in much weaker coherence between items than is found in LLM training data. This lack of structural unity leads to context pollution. In single-sequence modeling, unrelated behaviors compete for the same attention budget. This "noisy" signal dilutes the model's focus, effectively capping its ability to discern high-intent patterns from background activity. To address this, we propose Constructive Multi-Sequence Learning (CMSL), a paradigm shift from passive sequence ingestion to active "context engineering" that constructs multiple coherent sequences in latent space. CMSL leverages a learnable Sequence Construction Module to disentangle user history into "pure" thematic strands, followed by a linear attention mechanism to efficiently model these strands at scale. CMSL has been deployed across ranking and retrieval tasks and across four major surfaces at Meta.