Not All Is Lost: Repairing Lossy User Preference States of Personalization Encoders
Organizations: KDM Lab, Dhirubhai Ambani University · Dhirubhai Ambani University · LCS2 Lab, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
Abstract
Personalization encoders compress evolving interaction histories into preference states used to rank items or condition text generation. A task head operating only on this state can miss useful evidence that remains in the frozen encoder's cached representations for individual timesteps. We study this recoverability gap and propose REPAIR, which compares cached representations with the current preference state in a compact learned coordinate space. It resolves corrective evidence over extended history, recent interactions, and localized bursts. It then selects which patterns at which timesteps contribute and adds their aggregate correction to the state before the task head. Encoder-host repair reuses representations from the existing forward computation without re-encoding the history. Across MovieLens, PENS, MIND, and Amazon Reviews 2023, training only REPAIR improves MRR and nDCG@10 for all twelve representative recommendation hosts while both encoder and task head remain frozen. Head-only finetuning of the same hosts yields smaller gains. For example, Mamba4Rec on MovieLens gains 3.96 MRR points, compared with 0.19 from head-only finetuning. Rank and temporal diagnostics support a compact, host-dependent corrective structure. In personalized generation, IMPerSumm improves the two reported weighted PerSEval variants, which assess responsiveness to user preference, by up to 25.23%. These results support post-compression state correction and distinguish the availability of preference evidence from its downstream use.
Figures & tables
| Task | Dataset | Host Coverage | Test Instances |
|---|---|---|---|
| Movie recommendation | MovieLens | 9 sequential hosts | 15K |
| News recommendation | MIND | 7 history encoders | 20K |
| News recommendation | PENS | History encoders and LLMs | 20K |
| Product recommendation | Amazon Reviews 2023 | 3 multimodal hosts | 2K |
| Headline generation | PENS | 11 encoder interfaces and 2 LLMs | 20K |
| Dataset | Host | MRR / nDCG@10 | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Original Host | Head-only FT | REPAIR (Frozen Head) | REPAIR + Head Alignment | ||
| MovieLens | S: TiSASRec | 35.51 / 41.14 | 35.57 / 41.19 | 36.38 / 42.07 | 36.78 / 42.91 |
| M: Mamba4Rec | 29.29 / 38.50 | 29.48 / 38.89 | 33.25 / 39.20 | 34.26 / 40.17 | |
| W: SASRec | 26.43 / 33.82 | 27.05 / 34.37 | 29.57 / 40.08 | 28.49 / 35.18 | |
| PENS | S: LSTUR | 10.44 / 12.15 | 10.98 / 12.32 | 11.98 / 12.71 | 12.85 / 15.88 |
| M: EBNR | 2.65 / 2.45 | 2.93 / 2.86 | 4.07 / 3.97 | 11.97 / 14.28 | |
| Host / Dataset | Original Host | REPAIR Rank | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 32 | 64 | 128 | 192 | ||
| OpenCLIP / Amazon | 1.59 / 1.05 | 9.31 / 9.78 | 11.17 / 12.22 | 19.49 / 22.08 | 11.63 / 12.16 |
| SigLIP2 / Amazon | 2.40 / 2.18 | 10.44 / 11.36 | 8.42 / 8.77 | 17.72 / 20.35 | 13.46 / 13.15 |
| EBNR / PENS | 2.65 / 2.45 | 6.13 / 6.19 | 8.65 / 8.58 | 11.97 / 14.28 | 11.23 / 13.17 |
| Mamba4Rec / MovieLens | 29.29 / 38.50 | 31.47 / 38.85 | 32.38 / 39.26 | 34.26 / 40.17 | 34.02 / 39.96 |
| LSTUR / MIND | 51.43 / 59.63 | 52.67 / 62.14 | 53.49 / 64.13 | 55.84 / 66.92 | 54.73 / 66.12 |
| Controlled one-view diagnostic | Full REPAIR ( jointly) | ||||||
| Dataset | Host | L-Tr | S-Tr | E-Tr | L-Tr | S-Tr | E-Tr |
| Copy-through prediction | all three views used jointly | ||||||
| MovieLens | Mamba4Rec | [33.95] | [33.92] | [33.88] | [34.87] | [35.52] | [34.39] |
| TiSASRec | [36.19] | [36.20] | [36.04] | [37.38] | [36.93] | [36.63] | |
| MIND | NAML | [52.12] | [52.03] | [53.70] | [53.31] | [54.55] | [53.80] |
| EBNR | [55.08] | [53.64] | [53.70] | [56.79] | [55.69] | [53.19] | |
| Tasks (Datasets) | Host Model | Base | + SERAC-Corr | + Rec-Denoiser-Corr | + REPAIR | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MRR | nDCG@10 | MRR | nDCG@10 | MRR | nDCG@10 | MRR | nDCG@10 | ||
| Movie Reco. (MovieLens) | TiSASRec | 35.51 | 41.14 | 33.17 | 41.32 | 34.21 | 42.08 | 36.78 | 42.91 |
| Mamba4Rec | 29.29 | 38.50 | 29.81 | 38.63 | 31.32 | 39.22 | 34.26 | 40.17 | |
| SIGMA | 33.27 | 38.96 | 31.95 | 38.98 | 29.43 | 39.61 | 34.81 | 40.72 | |
| News Reco. (MIND) | LSTUR | 51.43 | 59.63 | 53.66 | 62.17 | 52.45 | 61.35 | 55.84 | 66.92 |
| NAML | 45.65 | 46.56 | 46.47 | 51.33 | 48.12 | 48.94 | 53.22 | 63.18 | |
| Host | RG-L | METEOR | PSE-W-JSD | PSE-W-RG-L |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Walk2Pers | +6.58 | +13.38 | +13.25 | +15.32 |
| IMPerSumm | -2.69 | +4.76 | +20.76 | +25.23 |
| DeepSeek-32B | +53.21 | +45.49 | +9.32 | +5.05 |
| Qwen2.5-32B | +41.58 | +47.64 | +31.52 | +12.61 |
Appendix figures & tables22 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Symbol | Meaning | Symbol | Meaning |
| Interaction and host interface | |||
| User interaction graph | User-specific typed node set | ||
| Action-labeled edge set | Initial user node | ||
| Content or response node | Observed action label | ||
| Normalized action types | Interaction unit at timestep | ||
| Model-side prefix trajectory | Current prefix endpoint | ||
| Symbol | Meaning | Symbol | Meaning |
| Temporal resolution | |||
| Temporal basis index | Long-support temporal basis | ||
| Short-support temporal basis | Episodic-support temporal basis | ||
| Learned long-support decay vector | Learned episodic-support rate vector | ||
| Temporal branch-mixing matrices | Multi-basis resolution operator | ||
| Temporally resolved corrective vector | |||
| Component | Symbol / Configuration | Dimension / Value |
| Core repair-interface dimensions | ||
| Repair-interface state dimension | ||
| Repair-interface cached-representation dimension | ||
| Shared repair space | ||
| Repair rank | ||
| Maximum history length | ||
| Setting | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenCLIP / Amazon | [2.04, 2.36] | [4.17, 4.64] | [18.97, 20.06] |
| SigLIP2 / Amazon | [2.33, 2.91] | [3.97, 4.33] | [17.37, 18.04] |
| EBNR / PENS | [2.73, 3.05] | [3.98, 4.24] | [11.76, 12.25] |
| Setting | Host | MRR | nDCG@5 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | + REPAIR | Base | + REPAIR | ||||
| Direct | Mamba4Rec | 29.29 | 34.26 | +4.97 | 30.07 | 35.56 | +5.49 |
| TiSASRec | 35.51 | 36.78 | +1.27 | 36.87 | 38.41 | +1.54 | |
| HSTU | 29.00 | 30.62 | +1.62 | 29.69 | 31.55 | +1.86 | |
| FEARec | 28.03 | 30.62 | +2.59 | 28.20 | 31.55 | +3.35 | |
| SIGMA | 33.27 | 34.81 | +1.54 | 34.43 | 36.26 | +1.83 | |
| Host | MRR | nDCG@5 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | + REPAIR | Base | + REPAIR | |||
| EBNR | 2.65 | 11.97 | +9.32 | 1.82 | 12.68 | +10.86 |
| NAML | 1.29 | 12.38 | +11.09 | 0.43 | 13.16 | +12.73 |
| NRMS | 1.18 | 12.11 | +10.93 | 0.39 | 12.89 | +12.50 |
| TrRMIo | 8.02 | 12.86 | +4.84 | 7.85 | 13.97 | +6.12 |
| SCAPE | 1.57 | 8.34 | +6.77 | 0.76 | 7.91 | +7.15 |
| Host | MRR | nDCG@5 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | + REPAIR | Base | + REPAIR | |||
| EBNR | 47.08 | 53.22 | +6.14 | 48.65 | 57.21 | +8.56 |
| NAML | 45.65 | 53.22 | +7.57 | 43.13 | 57.21 | +14.08 |
| NRMS | 44.91 | 52.74 | +7.83 | 42.38 | 56.48 | +14.10 |
| TrRMIo | 47.43 | 55.21 | +7.78 | 46.27 | 52.83 | +6.56 |
| SCAPE-GRU | 42.53 | 45.32 | +2.79 | 37.53 | 44.15 | +6.62 |
| Host | MRR | nDCG@5 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | + REPAIR | Base | + REPAIR | |||
| SigLIP2 | 2.40 | 17.72 | +15.33 | 1.53 | 17.71 | +16.18 |
| OpenCLIP | 1.59 | 19.49 | +17.91 | 0.64 | 19.46 | +18.83 |
| DINOv2 E5 | 1.19 | 16.15 | +14.96 | 0.43 | 16.30 | +15.87 |
| Host | RG-1 | RG-L | RG-SU4 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | + REPAIR | Gain (%) | Base | + REPAIR | Gain (%) | Base | + REPAIR | Gain (%) | |
| DeepSeek-32B | 20.62 | 26.84 | +30.16% | 13.85 | 21.22 | +53.21% | 4.42 | 11.99 | +171.27% |
| Qwen2.5-32B | 18.51 | 23.47 | +26.80% | 12.53 | 17.74 | +41.58% | 3.86 | 8.46 | +119.17% |
| FPG | 16.48 | 19.51 | +18.39% | 13.08 | 14.12 | +7.95% | 2.51 | 3.11 | +23.90% |
| SCAPE-GRU | 19.02 | 22.47 | +18.14% | 15.26 | 16.41 | +7.54% | 2.88 | 3.75 | +30.21% |
| GTP | 15.97 | 18.28 | +14.46% | 12.75 | 13.67 | +7.22% | 2.45 | 2.92 | +19.18% |
| Host | PSE-W-JSD | PSE-W-RG-L | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | + REPAIR | Gain (%) | Base | + REPAIR | Gain (%) | |
| DeepSeek-32B | 118 | 129 | +9.32% | 148.5 | 156 | +5.05% |
| Qwen2.5-32B | 92 | 121 | +31.52% | 125.3 | 141.1 | +12.61% |
| SCAPE | 103 | 112.5 | +9.22% | 128 | 135.2 | +5.62% |
| FPG | 74.8 | 83.9 | +12.17% | 104.2 | 110.4 | +5.95% |
| GTP | 89.5 | 98.7 | +10.28% | 113.8 | 120.8 | +6.15% |
| Host | Interface | Ranking | Generation Quality | Personalization | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MRR | nDCG@10 | RG-L | METEOR | PSE-W-JSD | PSE-W-RG-L | ||
| NAML | T1 | +859.69 | +1767.90 | +8.20 | +25.24 | +32.66 | +9.94 |
| T2 | +859.69 | +1767.90 | +7.96 | +23.28 | +32.30 | +9.49 | |
| EBNR | T1 | +351.70 | +482.86 | +7.76 | +27.51 | +31.09 | +10.33 |
| T2 | +351.70 | +482.86 | +7.48 | +26.87 | +30.25 | +9.53 | |
| NRMS | T1 | +926.27 | +1916.22 | +8.21 | +24.14 | +35.15 | +10.20 |
| Dataset | Host | Base | NoTS | L | S | E | L+S | S+E | L+E | L+S+E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MovieLens | Mamba4Rec | 29.29 | 28.43 | 29.92 | 29.63 | 29.45 | 32.17 | 31.35 | 31.04 | 34.26 |
| TiSASRec | 35.51 | 35.52 | 35.54 | 35.78 | 35.83 | 35.91 | 35.66 | 35.41 | 36.78 | |
| SIGMA | 33.27 | 33.29 | 33.66 | 33.32 | 33.29 | 33.88 | 33.73 | 33.43 | 34.81 | |
| MIND | NAML | 45.65 | 45.95 | 47.65 | 48.32 | 47.13 | 49.31 | 49.18 | 48.79 | 53.22 |
| EBNR | 47.08 | 47.74 | 48.88 | 48.03 | 47.62 | 50.13 | 49.38 | 48.76 | 53.22 | |
| NRMS | 44.91 | 45.06 | 46.43 | 45.13 | 47.73 | 47.58 | 46.44 | 46.15 | 52.74 |
| Dataset | Host | Base | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MovieLens | TiSASRec | 35.51 | 35.71 | 36.14 | 36.78 |
| Mamba4Rec | 29.29 | 31.43 | 32.16 | 34.26 | |
| MIND | LSTUR | 51.43 | 52.17 | 54.65 | 55.84 |
| NRMS | 44.91 | 46.39 | 51.29 | 52.74 |
| Host | MRR | nDCG@10 | SelSteps | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | NS | SEL | Base | NS | SEL | |||
| Mamba4Rec | 10 | 17.43 | 19.32 | 19.45 | 22.62 | 27.15 | 27.94 | 7 |
| 20 | 21.65 | 23.22 | 23.43 | 27.85 | 30.61 | 31.24 | 16 | |
| 30 | 26.11 | 28.45 | 28.29 | 33.32 | 35.40 | 35.36 | 22 | |
| 40 | 27.32 | 29.89 | 29.45 | 35.53 | 36.41 | 36.21 | 28 | |
| 50 | 29.29 | 33.95 | 34.26 | 38.50 | 40.03 | 40.17 | 34 | |
| Dataset | Host Encoder | Noisy Base | + REPAIR | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MRR | nDCG@10 | MRR | nDCG@10 | ||
| MovieLens | Mamba4Rec | 18.21 | 23.94 | 21.43 | 25.74 |
| MovieLens | TiSASRec | 22.34 | 25.92 | 24.65 | 28.17 |
| MIND | NAML | 28.61 | 29.23 | 32.85 | 35.81 |
| MIND | EBNR | 29.63 | 32.44 | 31.65 | 35.17 |
| Host | Base MRR | + REPAIR | Gain (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mamba4Rec | 29.29 | 34.26 | +4.97 | 16.96 |
| TiSASRec | 35.51 | 36.78 | +1.27 | 3.57 |
| EBNR | 47.08 | 53.22 | +6.14 | 13.04 |
| NAML | 45.65 | 53.22 | +7.57 | 16.58 |
| DeepSeek-32B | 1.31 | 1.83 | +0.52 | 39.69 |
| Model | Work Unit | Base | Added Repair | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mamba4Rec | GFLOPs/query | 0.75 | 0.18 | 0.93 |
| TiSASRec | GFLOPs/query | 1.45 | 0.18 | 1.63 |
| NAML | GFLOPs/query | 0.03 | 0.02 | 0.05 |
| DeepSeek-32B | GFLOPs/token | 64.0 | unreported | 64.0 |
| Host And Serving Mode | Resident Artifacts | Online Operations And Cost Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Mamba4Rec . end-to-end encoder serving | Frozen : item embedding table + 4-layer selective SSM encoder. Added : repair module attached to exposed terminal state. | one frozen encoder pass + residual repair fusion. Sequence evidence is cached within the existing forward pass and released after the step. |
| TiSASRec . end-to-end encoder serving | Frozen : item table + time-interval-aware self-attention encoder. Added : repair module attached to exposed terminal state. | attention score/value passes + repair fusion. Latency is more sensitive to sequence interactions because the host is attention-based rather than SSM-based. |
| NAML . cached news-table serving | Frozen : cached NEWS_TABLE + frozen user encoder. Added : repair module attached after cached-history composition. | table lookup / memory bandwidth + attentive user aggregation. Serving shifts a large fraction of work out of online text encoding and into cached vector retrieval. |
| DeepSeek-32B . context-conditioned autoregressive decoding | Frozen : frozen decoder weights + KV cache. Added : repair module + soft-prefix projection. | token-by-token decoding. Prefix-conditioned decoding builds the appropriate attention cache for the modified input. |
| Host | MRR | Hit@10 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base | + REPAIR | Base | + REPAIR | |||
| SASRec | 4.11 | 4.56 | +0.45 | 7.82 | 8.76 | +0.94 |
| TextCNN | 2.57 | 2.78 | +0.21 | 5.08 | 5.04 | -0.04 |
| GRU4Rec | 4.14 | 4.56 | +0.42 | 8.80 | 9.13 | +0.33 |