Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) aims to alleviate data sparsity in the target domain by incorporating knowledge from external domains. Existing approaches typically rely on overlapping users between the source and target domains as a bridge for knowledge transfer. However, in practice, user information across domains is often unavailable due to privacy protection, platform isolation, and data sharing restrictions, rendering most methods ineffective. In this article, we propose the D2TCDR, a two-stage generative CDR framework to address this critical limitation. By modeling the domain-level distribution that captures user preferences shared across domains, we extract transferable knowledge and guide its transfer through a generative process, reducing reliance on overlapping users and alleviating data sparsity in the target domain. D2TCDR first proposes a domain disentanglement module to extract the domain-invariant representations, capturing shared preferences across domains by eliminating domain-specific interference. Subsequently, a guided diffusion model is designed to model the domain-level distribution of these domain-invariant representations. By injecting target-domain signals into the guided diffusion model, we further steer the learned distribution toward the target domain, achieving knowledge transfer without relying on overlapping users. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain datasets show the superior performance of D2TCDR, validating its recommendation capabilities in complex transfer scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/Red-Week/D2TCDR .

User behavior records serve as the foundation for recommender systems. While the behavior data exhibits ease of acquisition, it often suffers from varying quality. Current methods employ data valuation to discern high-quality data from low-quality data. However, they tend to employ blackbox design, lacking transparency and interpretability. Besides, they are typically tailored to specific evaluation metrics, leading to limited generality across various tasks. To overcome these issues, we propose an explainable and versatile framework DVR which can enhance the efficiency of data utilization tailored to any requirements of the model architectures and evaluation metrics. For explainable data valuation, a data valuator is presented to evaluate the data quality via calculating its Shapley value from the game-theoretic perspective, ensuring robust mathematical properties and reliability. In order to accommodate various evaluation metrics, including differentiable and non-differentiable ones, a metric adapter is devised based on reinforcement learning, where a metric is treated as the reinforcement reward that guides model optimization. Extensive experiments conducted on various benchmarks verify that our framework can improve the performance of current recommendation algorithms on various metrics including ranking accuracy, diversity, and fairness. Specifically, our framework achieves up to 34.7% improvements over existing methods in terms of representative NDCG metric. The code is available at https://github.com/renqii/DVR.

Split learning (SL) is widely regarded as a promising distributed machine learning framework with superior privacy-preserving properties, lower communication and computation costs. However, in real Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios, existing SL may not perform well because the local data of IoT devices often do not follow the same distribution. This leads to the model continuously adapting to the current data distribution in each training epoch, resulting in a catastrophic forgetting phenomenon. Existing methods typically attempt to add raw or generated data from previous devices in the current training epoch to review knowledge, but direct access to the local data of other devices carries serious privacy risks. Data augmentation techniques based on generative networks often have poor robustness and increase the computation cost on the device side. To address these challenges, we propose a new SL framework called SL without Forgetting (SLwF). To mitigate catastrophic forgetting without accessing any previous data, we propose a contrastive learning-based training method that leverages current training data to review previous knowledge, and learn new knowledge better. Furthermore, we adopt an exponential moving average (EMA)-based model update strategy to preserve lost knowledge, further alleviating the forgetting problem. We implement the SLwF framework in real IoT scenarios and extensively evaluated its performance using four publicly available datasets. Compared to other related research (e.g., IoTSL), SLwF performs better in terms of final accuracy and robustness while avoiding excessive device energy consumption.

Group activities have become an essential part of people’s daily life, which stimulates the requirement for intensive research on the group recommendation task, i.e., recommending items to a group of users. Most existing works focus on aggregating users’ interests within the group to learn group preference. These methods are faced with two problems. First, these methods only model the user preference inside a single group while ignoring the collaborative relations among users and items across different groups. Second, they assume that group preference is an aggregation of user interests, and factually a group may pursue some targets not derived from users’ interests. Thus they are insufficient to model the general group preferences which are independent of existing user interests. To address the above issues, we propose a novel dual channel Hypergraph Convolutional network for group Recommendation (HCR), which consists of member-level preference network and group-level preference network. In the member-level preference network, in order to capture cross-group collaborative connections among users and items, we devise a member-level hypergraph convolutional network to learn group members’ personal preferences. In the group-level preference network, the group’s general preference is captured by a group-level graph convolutional network based on group similarity. We evaluate our model on two real-world datasets and the experimental results show that the proposed model significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art group recommendation techniques.

Sequential recommendation that aims to predict user preference with historical user interactions becomes one of the most popular tasks in the recommendation area. The existing methods concentrated on user's sequential features among exposed items have achieved good performance. However, they only rely on single item prediction optimization to learn data representation, which ignores the association between context data and sequence data. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised learning based sequential recommendation network (SSLRN), which contrastively learns data correlation to promote data representation of users and items. We design two auxiliary contrastive learning tasks to regularize user and item representation based on mutual information maximization (MIM). In particular, the item contrastive learning captures sequential contrast feature with sequence-item MIM, and the user contrastive learning regularizes user latent representation with user-item MIM. We evaluate our model on five real-world datasets and the experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art sequential recommendation techniques.