Sequential Recommendation

Recommender systems are widely used in the digital landscape to match users with content fitting their preferences. However, growing concerns about fake accounts, strategic manipulation, and other deceptive online behavior place increasing pressure on the reliability of these systems. A common statistical approach behind recommender systems is so-called matrix completion, which predicts how users would rate items they have not yet consumed based on patterns in observed ratings. Realistically applying matrix completion methods requires jointly addressing several overlooked challenges: (i) ratings on discrete scales (such as 1--5 stars); (ii) the presence of malicious users who deliberately manipulate the system to their advantage through fake profiles; (iii) ratings missing not at random since users are more likely to consume items they expect to like; and (iv) fostering transparency, reproducibility, and stability. We jointly address these challenges by proposing a novel method, Robust Discrete Matrix Completion (RDMC), designed to capture the key characteristics of sparse rating data while remaining reliable in the presence of manipulation. We evaluate RDMC through two case studies and carefully designed simulation experiments. Our work thereby offers a statistically-sound blueprint for future studies on how to evaluate recommender systems under realistic scenarios.

Owing to the unprecedented capability in semantic understanding and logical reasoning, large language models (LLMs) have shown fantastic potential in developing next-generation sequential recommender systems (RSs). However, existing LLM-based sequential RSs mostly separate index generation from sequential recommendation, leading to insufficient integration between semantic information and collaborative information. On the other hand, the neglect of user-related information hinders LLM-based sequential RSs from exploiting high-order user-item interaction patterns. In this paper, we propose the End-to-End Dual Dynamic (ED$^2$) recommender, the first LLM-based sequential RS which adopts dual dynamic index mechanism, targeting resolving the above limitations simultaneously. The dual dynamic index mechanism can not only assembly index generation and sequential recommendation into a unified LLM-backbone pipeline, but also make it practical for LLM-based sequential recommender to take advantage of user-related information. Specifically, to facilitate the LLM comprehension ability to dual dynamic index, we propose a multigrained token regulator which constructs alignment supervision based on LLMs semantic knowledge across multiple representation granularities. Moreover, the associated user collection data and a series of novel instruction tuning tasks are specially customized to capture the high-order user-item interaction patterns. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the superiority of ED$^2$, achieving an average improvement of 19.62% in Hit-Rate and 21.11% in NDCG.