Papers › Memory Augmented Multi-Instance Contrastive Predictive Coding for Sequential Recommendation

Memory Augmented Multi-Instance Contrastive Predictive Coding for Sequential Recommendation

1 Sep 2021arXiv:2109.00368archive 2025-07-28

Ruihong Qiu, Zi Huang, Hongzhi Yin

The sequential recommendation aims to recommend items, such as products, songs and places, to users based on the sequential patterns of their historical records. Most existing sequential recommender models consider the next item prediction task as the training signal. Unfortunately, there are two essential challenges for these methods: (1) the long-term preference is difficult to capture, and (2) the supervision signal is too sparse to effectively train a model. In this paper, we propose a novel sequential recommendation framework to overcome these challenges based on a memory augmented multi-instance contrastive predictive coding scheme, denoted as MMInfoRec. The basic contrastive predictive coding (CPC) serves as encoders of sequences and items. The memory module is designed to augment the auto-regressive prediction in CPC to enable a flexible and general representation of the encoded preference, which can improve the ability to capture the long-term preference. For effective training of the MMInfoRec model, a novel multi-instance noise contrastive estimation (MINCE) loss is proposed, using multiple positive samples, which offers effective exploitation of samples inside a mini-batch. The proposed MMInfoRec framework falls into the contrastive learning style, within which, however, a further finetuning step is not required given that its contrastive training task is well aligned with the target recommendation task. With extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, MMInfoRec can outperform the state-of-the-art baselines.

PaperPDFCode

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

Code

RuihongQiu/MMInfoRec officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report
RuihongQiu/DuoRec mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT 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

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Contrastive LearningSequential Recommendation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Contrastive LearningContrastive Predictive CodingInfoNCE

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