IDNP: Interest Dynamics Modeling Using Generative Neural Processes for Sequential Recommendation

Recent sequential recommendation models rely increasingly on consecutive short-term user-item interaction sequences to model user interests. These approaches have, however, raised concerns about both short- and long-term interests. (1) short-term: interaction sequences may not result from a monolithic interest, but rather from several intertwined interests, even within a short period of time, resulting in their failures to model skip behaviors; (2) long-term: interaction sequences are primarily observed sparsely at discrete intervals, other than consecutively over the long run. This renders difficulty in inferring long-term interests, since only discrete interest representations can be derived, without taking into account interest dynamics across sequences. In this study, we address these concerns by learning (1) multi-scale representations of short-term interests; and (2) dynamics-aware representations of long-term interests. To this end, we present an Interest Dynamics modeling framework using generative Neural Processes, coined IDNP, to model user interests from a functional perspective. IDNP learns a global interest function family to define each user's long-term interest as a function instantiation, manifesting interest dynamics through function continuity. Specifically, IDNP first encodes each user's short-term interactions into multi-scale representations, which are then summarized as user context. By combining latent global interest with user context, IDNP then reconstructs long-term user interest functions and predicts interactions at upcoming query timestep. Moreover, IDNP can model such interest functions even when interaction sequences are limited and non-consecutive. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art on various evaluation metrics.