English

Similarity-Guided Diffusion for Contrastive Sequential Recommendation

Information Retrieval 2025-07-17 v1

Abstract

In sequential recommendation systems, data augmentation and contrastive learning techniques have recently been introduced using diffusion models to achieve robust representation learning. However, most of the existing approaches use random augmentation, which risk damaging the contextual information of the original sequence. Accordingly, we propose a Similarity-Guided Diffusion for Contrastive Sequential Recommendation. Our method leverages the similarity between item embedding vectors to generate semantically consistent noise. Moreover, we utilize high confidence score in the denoising process to select our augmentation positions. This approach more effectively reflects contextual and structural information compared to augmentation at random positions. From a contrastive learning perspective, the proposed augmentation technique provides more discriminative positive and negative samples, simultaneously improving training efficiency and recommendation performance. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets show that SimDiffRec outperforms the existing baseline models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.11866,
  title  = {Similarity-Guided Diffusion for Contrastive Sequential Recommendation},
  author = {Jinkyeong Choi and Yejin Noh and Donghyeon Park},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.11866},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:03:31.188Z