Next-basket recommendation (NBR) is a type of recommendation that aims to predict a set of items a user will purchase based on their historical transaction basket sequences. It is governed by a dynamic interplay between two distinct user intents: habitual repurchase, which involves repeating past behaviors, and exploratory interest, which involves discovering new items. However, existing NBR methods generally suffer from two limitations: (1) they often entangle these conflicting motives within a single representation, causing habits to overshadow discovery, and (2) they rely on discrete sequential modeling that ignores continuous-time intervals and item-specific periodicities. In this paper, we propose a novel solution named Time-Interval Disentangled Experts (TIDE) to address these challenges. TIDE incorporates a Hawkes-enhanced Fourier Time Encoding to capture item-specific temporal periodicities and dynamic decay. To decouple user intentions, TIDE utilizes a dual-expert architecture that integrates a Habit Expert for recurring needs and a Pattern-Guided Exploration Expert for discovery. Combined with an item-aware gating mechanism, TIDE adaptively balances repurchase and exploration. Extensive experiments on four diverse real-world datasets demonstrate that TIDE consistently outperforms representative state-of-the-art NBR methods.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have proven highly effective for recommendation systems by capturing latent item relationships, while recent integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) has further enhanced semantic understanding and addressed knowledge sparsity issues. Nevertheless, current KG&LLM-based methods still face three main limitations: 1) inadequate modeling of implicit semantics relationships beyond explicit KG links; 2) suboptimal single-channel fusion of ID and LLM embeddings, which often leads to signal interference and blurred representations; and 3) insufficient consideration of user-item interaction frequency variations in recommendation strategies. To address these challenges, we propose the Dual-Channel Graph Learning (DCGL) framework, featuring three key innovations: 1) a dual-channel architecture that structurally decoupling rich semantic information from user behavioral patterns, preventing early interference; 2) a multi-level contrastive learning mechanism that enhances robustness against KG noise through intra-view contrast and bridges semantic gaps between channels via inter-view alignment; and 3) a dynamic fusion mechanism that adaptively balances semantic generalization and behavioral specificity based on interaction frequency, resolving the cascading limitation. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that DCGL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, yielding substantial improvements in sparse scenarios while maintaining precision for active users. Our code is available at https://github.com/XinchiZou/DCGL.

Sequential basket analysis is a challenging task that focuses on modeling user interests through their shopping basket records. This study focuses on a newly identified bias: the repetition bias , which typically arises due to repurchase behavior . Existing methods typically oversimplify the relationship between repetitions and predictions. They assume that frequent repetition of an item by a user indicates a strong preference of the user. However, this assumption is flawed as it fails to consider that repetitions are not driven solely by user interests, as they can also be influenced by external factors, resulting in a biased understanding of user interests. In this article, we propose the CA usal intervention for R epetition D e-biasing ( CARD ), a novel solution to comprehensively estimate various influencing factors and address the repetition bias, thereby ensuring a more accurate learning of user interests. Specifically, we design a multi-factor estimation debiasing framework with constructed causal graphs to formalize the data generation process within the recommendation. We then analyze the variables that influence the recommendation, with the goal of identifying confounding variables that affect repurchase behavior and thereby locating the source of repetition bias. Since repetition bias originates from the influence of confounding variables on repurchase behavior, we resort to causal intervention methods to prevent its impacts and thus eliminate repetition bias at its source for unbiased user interest modeling. We evaluate CARD by conducting extensive experiments over three real-world datasets. The results demonstrate our approach’s competitiveness over the representative state-of-the-art baselines in achieving unbiased user interest modeling.

Rationalization empowers deep learning models with self-explaining capabilities through a cooperative game, where a generator selects a semantically consistent subset of the input as a rationale, and a subsequent predictor makes predictions based on the selected rationale. In this paper, we discover that rationalization is prone to a problem named rationale shift, which arises from the algorithmic bias of the cooperative game. Rationale shift refers to a situation where the semantics of the selected rationale may deviate from the original input, but the predictor still produces accurate predictions based on the deviation, resulting in a compromised generator with misleading feedback. To address this issue, we first demonstrate the importance of the alignment between the rationale and the full input through both empirical observations and theoretical analysis. Subsequently, we introduce a novel approach called DAR (Discriminatively Aligned Rationalization), which utilizes an auxiliary module pretrained on the full input to discriminatively align the selected rationale and the original input. We theoretically illustrate how DAR accomplishes the desired alignment, thereby overcoming the rationale shift problem. The experiments on two widely used real-world benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly improves the explanation quality (measured by the overlap between the model-selected explanation and the human-annotated rationale) as compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Additionally, results on two synthetic settings further validate the effectiveness of DAR in addressing the rationale shift problem.

Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict the anonymous user's next-click items by modeling the short-term sequence pattern. As most existing SBR models generally generate item representations based only on information propagation over the short sequence while ignoring additional valuable knowledge, their expressive abilities are somewhat limited by data sparsity caused by short sequence. Though there have been some attempts on utilizing items' attributes, they basically embed attributes into items directly, ignoring the fact that 1) there is no contextual relationship among attributes; and 2) users have varying levels of attention to different attributes, which still leads to unsatisfactory performance. To tackle the issues, we propose a novel Attribute-enhanced Dual Channel Representation Learning (ADRL) model for SBR, in which we independently model session representations in attribute-related pattern and sequence-related pattern. Specifically, we learn session representations with sequence patterns from the session graph, and we further design an frequency-driven attribute aggregator to generate the attribute-related session representations within a session. The proposed attribute aggregator is plug-and-play, as it can be coupled with most existing SBR models. Extensive experiments on three real-world public datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ADRL over several state-of-the-art baselines, as well as the effectiveness and efficiency of our attribute aggregator module.

Next-basket recommendation (NBR) is a type of recommendation that aims to recommend a set of items to users according to their historical basket sequences. Existing NBR methods suffer from two limitations: (1) overlooking low-level item correlations, which results in coarse-grained item representation; and (2) failing to consider spurious interests in repeated behaviors, leading to suboptimal user interest learning. To address these limitations, we propose a novel solution named Multi-view Multi-aspect Neural Recommendation (MMNR) for NBR, which first normalizes the interactions from both the user-side and item-side, respectively, aiming to remove the spurious interests, and utilizes them as weights for items from different views to construct differentiated representations for each interaction item, enabling comprehensive user interest learning. Then, to capture low-level item correlations, MMNR models different aspects of items to obtain disentangled representations of items, thereby fully capturing multiple user interests. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MMNR, showing that it consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art NBR methods.