Beyond Static Diffusion: Explicitly Modeling Temporal Patterns in Sequential Recommendation
Abstract
Sequential recommendation predicts the next items a user will interact with by modeling evolving preferences over time. Recent diffusion-based generative recommenders show promise in capturing complex dependencies, but they typically treat temporal context as an external conditioning signal rather than integrating temporal transitions into the diffusion dynamics. In this paper, we introduce TDRec (Temporally-aware Diffusion for sequential Recommendation), a novel framework that integrates temporal progression into both forward and reverse processes: at each diffusion step, a position's latent is updated by noise injection and by mixing with its preceding latent. We derive a closed-form solution for this temporal mixing process, proving that it allows for efficient parallel training with O(1) complexity relative to sequence length. Furthermore, we establish the existence of a corresponding DDPM-like reverse process and a reparameterized objective, ensuring efficient optimization and sampling without incurring extra computational overhead. Empirical results on three public datasets demonstrate that TDRec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including recent diffusion models. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the temporal scheduler and sequence-reduction module in generating coherent, context-aware predictions. Code is available at https://github.com/wuyaoericyy/TDRec.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lantao Hu | 60 | 74 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 74 Modeling User Fatigue for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 73 Distinguished Quantized Guidance for Diffusion-based Sequence Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 2 | Yongjing Hao | 54 | 77 Meta-Optimized Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 63 Feature-Level Deeper Self-Attention Network With Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 61 Learnable Model Augmentation Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 3 | Noveen Sachdeva | 49 | 64 Explicit Modelling of the Implicit Short Term User Preferences for Music Recommendation (2018) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 60 ActionPiece: Contextually Tokenizing Action Sequences for Generative Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 50 Attentive neural architecture incorporating song features for music recommendation (2018) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Yanan Niu | 53 |
Area-chair candidates (5)
| Xin Xin 0003 COI: co-author | 55 | 10 papers | |
| Yanan Niu assigned | 53 | 15 papers | |
| Leyu Lin | 50 | 15 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 49 | 5 papers | |
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 47 | 15 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 63 | 3 | 74 On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 74 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 2 | Fei Sun 0001 COI: co-author | 60 | 3 | 64 XDM: Improving Sequential Deep Matching with Unclicked User Behaviors for Recommender System (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 64 LoRec: Combating Poisons with Large Language Model for Robust Sequential Recommendation (2024) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift |
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| 3 | Lantao Hu assigned | 60 | 3 | 74 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 74 Modeling User Fatigue for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 4 | Bo Peng 0009 | 60 | 3 | 64 HAM: Hybrid Associations Models for Sequential Recommendation (Extended abstract) (2023) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 64 $\mathop {\mathtt {HAM}}$HAM: Hybrid Associations Models for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 5 | Jianling Wang | 58 | 3 | 64 Recurrent Recommendation with Local Coherence (2019) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 63 Learning to Augment for Casual User Recommendation (2022) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 6 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 56 | 3 | 67 Temporal Linear Item-Item Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 64 MUFFIN: Mixture of User-Adaptive Frequency Filtering for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 8 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 54 | 3 | 64 Reciprocal Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 55 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 9 | Qiang Luo 0004 | 54 | 3 | 64 FIM: Frequency-Aware Multi-View Interest Modeling for Local-Life Service Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 62 MPFormer: Adaptive Framework for Industrial Multi-Task Personalized Sequential Retriever (2025) Multi-Task and Multi-Objective Optimization |
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| 10 | Mengyuan Jing | 54 | 3 | 70 Interest-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation With Diffusion-Based Augmentation (2026) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 69 Generating Difficulty-aware Negative Samples via Conditional Diffusion for Multi-modal Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 11 | Yongjing Hao assigned | 54 | 3 | 77 Meta-Optimized Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 63 Feature-Level Deeper Self-Attention Network With Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 12 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 53 | 3 | 74 Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 73 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 15 | Hao Liu 0078 | 50 | 3 | 63 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 52 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 16 | Chen Wang 0052 | 50 | 3 | 63 Confidence-Aware Fine-Tuning of Sequential Recommendation Systems Via Conformal Prediction (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 54 Cluster-Aware Item Prompt Learning for Session-Based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Enhanced Sequential Recommendation |
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| 17 | Xuanhua Yang | 50 | 3 | 73 Towards Personalized Bundle Creative Generation with Contrastive Non-Autoregressive Decoding (2022) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 50 Hierarchical User Long-term Behavior Modeling for Click-Through Rate Prediction (2025) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction |
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| 18 | Wei Guo 0006 COI: co-author | 50 | 3 | 63 Dataset Regeneration for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 61 FuXi-γ: Efficient Sequential Recommendation with Exponential-Power Temporal Encoder and Diagonal-Sparse Positional Mechanism (2026) Efficient Sequential Recommendation Architectures |
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| 19 | Yang Song 0008 | 49 | 3 | 61 Understanding and Modeling Passive-Negative Feedback for Short-video Sequential Recommendation (2023) Multi-Behavior Recommendation 60 Learning and Optimization of Implicit Negative Feedback for Industrial Short-video Recommender System (2023) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation |
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| 20 | Noveen Sachdeva assigned | 49 | 3 | 64 Explicit Modelling of the Implicit Short Term User Preferences for Music Recommendation (2018) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 60 ActionPiece: Contextually Tokenizing Action Sequences for Generative Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 21 | Jiancan Wu | 49 | 3 | 81 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 63 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 23 | Han Li 0005 | 49 | 3 | 88 DiffusionGS: Generative Search with Query Conditioned Diffusion in Kuaishou (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 55 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 24 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 49 | 3 | 64 Test-Time Alignment with State Space Model for Tracking User Interest Shifts in Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 64 When Search Meets Recommendation: Learning Disentangled Search Representation for Recommendation (2023) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 25 | Yongxin Ni | 49 | 3 | 71 Bridging NIP and MLM: A Unified Meta-Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation (2026) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation 52 Global and Personalized Graphs for Heterogeneous Sequential Recommendation by Learning Behavior Transitions and User Intentions (2022) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 26 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 48 | 3 | 74 Disentangled Contrastive Bundle Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 45 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 27 | James Caverlee | 48 | 3 | 61 Consistency-Aware Recommendation for User-Generated Item List Continuation (2020) Multimodal Recommendation for Domain Applications 61 Sequential Recommendation for Cold-start Users with Meta Transitional Learning (2021) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 28 | Jieming Zhu COI: co-author | 48 | 3 | 61 EAGER: Two-Stream Generative Recommender with Behavior-Semantic Collaboration (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 54 FANS: Fast Non-Autoregressive Sequence Generation for Item List Continuation (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 29 | Jiangxia Cao | 48 | 3 | 84 From Agnostic to Specific: Latent Preference Diffusion for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 58 CDSRNP: Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation via Neural Process (2025) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation |
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| 30 | Junjie Zhang 0009 | 48 | 3 | 64 Frequency-Augmented Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts Framework for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 51 Curriculum-scheduled knowledge distillation from multiple pre-trained teachers for multi-domain sequential recommendation (2025) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 31 | Jinxin Hu | 48 | 3 | 64 SASNet: Stage-aware Sequential Matching for Online Travel Recommendation (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 53 HeterRec: Heterogeneous Information Transformer for Scalable Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 32 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 48 | 3 | 61 MESA: Plugin Meta-Modulation for Transformer-Based Cold-Start Sequential Recommendation (2026) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 60 Learning Graph-based Disentangled Representations for Next POI Recommendation (2022) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 33 | Ching Law | 48 | 3 | 74 Uni-Layout: Integrating Human Feedback in Unified Layout Generation and Evaluation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 74 MoFu: Scale-Aware Modulation and Fourier Fusion for Multi-Subject Video Generation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 34 | Min Hou 0004 | 47 | 3 | 63 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 61 STGCN: A Spatial-Temporal Aware Graph Learning Method for POI Recommendation (2020) Graph Neural Network Architectures for CF |