{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/collaboration-and-transition-distilling-item","title":"Collaboration and Transition: Distilling Item Transitions into Multi-Query Self-Attention for Sequential Recommendation","arxiv_id":"2311.01056","date":"2023-11-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tianyu Zhu","Yansong Shi","Yuan Zhang","Yihong Wu","Fengran Mo","Jian-Yun Nie"],"abstract":"Modern recommender systems employ various sequential modules such as self-attention to learn dynamic user interests. However, these methods are less effective in capturing collaborative and transitional signals within user interaction sequences. First, the self-attention architecture uses the embedding of a single item as the attention query, making it challenging to capture collaborative signals. Second, these methods typically follow an auto-regressive framework, which is unable to learn global item transition patterns. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new method called Multi-Query Self-Attention with Transition-Aware Embedding Distillation (MQSA-TED). First, we propose an $L$-query self-attention module that employs flexible window sizes for attention queries to capture collaborative signals. In addition, we introduce a multi-query self-attention method that balances the bias-variance trade-off in modeling user preferences by combining long and short-query self-attentions. Second, we develop a transition-aware embedding distillation module that distills global item-to-item transition patterns into item embeddings, which enables the model to memorize and leverage transitional signals and serves as a calibrator for collaborative signals. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01056v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.01056v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"collaboration-and-transition-distilling-item","repo_url":"https://github.com/zhuty16/mqsa-ted","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"},{"task_slug":"sequential-recommendation","task_name":"Sequential Recommendation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}