Papers › Cross-Domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users via Variational Information Bottleneck

Cross-Domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users via Variational Information Bottleneck

31 Mar 2022arXiv:2203.16863archive 2025-07-28

Jiangxia Cao, Jiawei Sheng, Xin Cong, Tingwen Liu, Bin Wang

Recommender systems have been widely deployed in many real-world applications, but usually suffer from the long-standing user cold-start problem. As a promising way, Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has attracted a surge of interest, which aims to transfer the user preferences observed in the source domain to make recommendations in the target domain. Previous CDR approaches mostly achieve the goal by following the Embedding and Mapping (EMCDR) idea which attempts to learn a mapping function to transfer the pre-trained user representations (embeddings) from the source domain into the target domain. However, they pre-train the user/item representations independently for each domain, ignoring to consider both domain interactions simultaneously. Therefore, the biased pre-trained representations inevitably involve the domain-specific information which may lead to negative impact to transfer information across domains. In this work, we consider a key point of the CDR task: what information needs to be shared across domains? To achieve the above idea, this paper utilizes the information bottleneck (IB) principle, and proposes a novel approach termed as CDRIB to enforce the representations encoding the domain-shared information. To derive the unbiased representations, we devise two IB regularizers to model the cross-domain/in-domain user-item interactions simultaneously and thereby CDRIB could consider both domain interactions jointly for de-biasing.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2203.16863")

Code

Syntology Ran 3 of 11 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 8 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · violated contract; 1 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran with no contract checked.

By repository: official repository: 11 samples from 1 repository, 3 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

cjx96/cdrib officialmentioned in paperpytorchMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

11 samples harvested; 3 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 8 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

1ran · violated contract
1ran · our draft was wrong
1ran
8unverified

Licence: 0 of the 11 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from cjx96/cdrib. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

normalize cjx96/cdrib/CDRIB/utils/GraphMaker.py official repository ran · violated contract MIT (permissive) · aa9c29936dee40a7 · report
set_cuda cjx96/cdrib/CDRIB/utils/torch_utils.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · f21db161a6b12a80 · report
sparse_mx_to_torch_sparse_tensor cjx96/cdrib/CDRIB/utils/GraphMaker.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · c97b99c4e8201a97 · report
create_item_dict cjx96/cdrib/dataset/preprocessing/split_data.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 58a62c6102341fce · report
create_user_dict cjx96/cdrib/dataset/preprocessing/split_data.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · b9294b4ef8b21c1f · report
flatten_indices cjx96/cdrib/CDRIB/utils/torch_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · aadcc8351221c2fd · report
get_min_group_size cjx96/cdrib/dataset/preprocessing/Filter_data_cold.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 36b8aea8d15b5258 · report
get_optimizer cjx96/cdrib/CDRIB/utils/torch_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · ee7a3e322ecd6668 · report
load_config cjx96/cdrib/CDRIB/utils/helper.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 5eda04e68e1704dc · report
read_dataset cjx96/cdrib/dataset/preprocessing/split_data.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 0045b063decbe8a5 · report
save_config cjx96/cdrib/CDRIB/utils/helper.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 844725f7776a3539 · report

Tasks

Recommendation Systems

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections