From Clues to Generation: Language-Guided Conditional Diffusion for Cross-Domain Recommendation
Abstract
Cross-domain Recommendation (CDR) exploits multi-domain correlations to alleviate data sparsity. As a core task within this field, inter-domain recommendation focuses on predicting preferences for users who interact in a source domain but lack behavioral records in a target domain. Existing approaches predominantly rely on overlapping users as anchors for knowledge transfer. In real-world scenarios, overlapping users are often scarce, leaving the vast majority of users with only single-domain interactions. For these users, the absence of explicit alignment signals makes fine-grained preference transfer intrinsically difficult. To address this challenge, this paper proposes Language-Guided Conditional Diffusion for CDR (LGCD), a novel framework that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) and diffusion models for inter-domain sequential recommendation. Specifically, we leverage LLM reasoning to bridge the domain gap by inferring potential target preferences for single-domain users and mapping them to real items, thereby constructing pseudo-overlapping data. We distinguish between real and pseudo-interaction pathways and introduce additional supervision constraints to mitigate the semantic noise brought by pseudo-interaction. Furthermore, we design a conditional diffusion architecture to precisely guide the generation of target user representations based on source-domain patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LGCD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in inter-domain recommendation tasks.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 69 | 64 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 64 On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 64 Addressing Missing Data Issue for Diffusion-based Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 2 | Xuanhua Yang | 57 | 71 Towards Personalized Bundle Creative Generation with Contrastive Non-Autoregressive Decoding (2022) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 57 GenRec: A Preference-Oriented Generative Framework for Large-Scale Recommendation (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 52 Breaking the Relevance-Diversity Seesaw: Hierarchical LLM Reasoning with RL for Industrial Novelty Recommendation (2026) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 3 | Han Li 0005 | 55 | 71 DiffusionGS: Generative Search with Query Conditioned Diffusion in Kuaishou (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 61 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 54 OneSug: The Unified End-to-End Generative Framework for E-commerce Query Suggestion (2026) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Leyu Lin | 56 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Leyu Lin assigned | 56 | 15 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 55 | 5 papers | |
| Yanan Niu | 54 | 15 papers | |
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 53 | 15 papers | |
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 53 | 8 papers | |
| Pengyue Jia | 51 | 10 papers | |
| Xin Xin 0003 | 49 | 10 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 assigned | 69 | 3 | 64 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 64 On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 2 | Bo Chen 0023 | 58 | 3 | 68 ReLLa: Retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 68 Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 3 | Lantao Hu | 57 | 3 | 65 Distinguished Quantized Guidance for Diffusion-based Sequence Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 64 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 4 | Xuanhua Yang assigned | 57 | 3 | 71 Towards Personalized Bundle Creative Generation with Contrastive Non-Autoregressive Decoding (2022) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 57 GenRec: A Preference-Oriented Generative Framework for Large-Scale Recommendation (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 5 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 56 | 3 | 61 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 52 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 7 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 56 | 3 | 71 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 64 Distinguished Quantized Guidance for Diffusion-based Sequence Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 8 | Hao Liu 0078 | 56 | 3 | 66 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 51 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 9 | Jianling Wang | 55 | 3 | 59 Fresh Content Recommendation at Scale: A Multi-funnel Solution and the Potential of LLMs (2024) Efficiency and Deployment 56 LLMs for User Interest Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 10 | Han Li 0005 assigned | 55 | 3 | 71 DiffusionGS: Generative Search with Query Conditioned Diffusion in Kuaishou (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 61 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 11 | Qiang Luo 0004 | 55 | 3 | 65 DiffGRM: Diffusion-based Generative Recommendation Model (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 56 OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 13 | Jiancan Wu | 54 | 3 | 65 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 59 Customizing Language Models with Instance-wise LoRA for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 15 | Yang Song 0008 | 54 | 3 | 59 Mixed Attention Network for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (2024) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation 54 Large Language Models Enhanced Collaborative Filtering (2024) LLM-Enhanced Collaborative Filtering |
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| 16 | Jieming Zhu COI: co-author | 54 | 3 | 59 ROMA: Recommendation-Oriented Language Model Adaptation Using Multi-Modal Multi-Domain Item Sequences (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 58 EAGER: Two-Stream Generative Recommender with Behavior-Semantic Collaboration (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 17 | Huifeng Guo | 54 | 3 | 55 Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Unifying Retrieval and Ranking with a Single Generative Recommendation Model (2025) Generative Retrieval and Ranking 55 SELF: Surrogate-light Feature Selection with Large Language Models in Deep Recommender Systems (2025) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion |
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| 18 | Jiangxia Cao | 53 | 3 | 70 From Agnostic to Specific: Latent Preference Diffusion for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 59 Contrastive Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2022) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 19 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 53 | 3 | 59 MoRE: A Mixture of Reflectors Framework for Large Language Model-Based Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 56 Large Language Models Enhanced Collaborative Filtering (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 22 | Yupeng Hou | 52 | 3 | 56 Inductive Generative Recommendation via Retrieval-based Speculation (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 55 Multi-Behavior Generative Recommendation (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 23 | Chen Wang 0052 | 52 | 3 | 57 Pre-Training with Transferable Attention for Addressing Market Shifts in Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation (2024) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation 52 Cluster-Aware Item Prompt Learning for Session-Based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Enhanced Sequential Recommendation |
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| 24 | Ke Wang 0038 | 52 | 3 | 76 LLM-Grounded Diffusion for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 60 Contrastive Multi-view Interest Learning for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 25 | Fei Sun 0001 | 52 | 3 | 53 LoRec: Combating Poisons with Large Language Model for Robust Sequential Recommendation (2024) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift 52 Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 26 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 51 | 3 | 57 MergeRec: Model Merging for Data-Isolated Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2026) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation 53 Temporal Linear Item-Item Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 27 | Junwei Pan | 51 | 3 | 65 Cross-Scale Collaboration between LLMs and Lightweight Sequential Recommenders with Domain-Specific Latent Reasoning (2026) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization 61 Empowering Large Language Model for Sequential Recommendation via Multimodal Embeddings and Semantic IDs (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 28 | Riwei Lai | 51 | 3 | 60 Proxy-Aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2023) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation 59 Proxy-enhanced cross-domain sequential recommendation (2025) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 29 | Qijiong Liu | 51 | 3 | 58 ONCE: Boosting Content-based Recommendation with Both Open- and Closed-source Large Language Models (2024) LLM-Derived Knowledge Infusion 53 RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation (2025) Generative Retrieval and Recommendation Architectures |
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| 30 | Chongming Gao | 51 | 3 | 58 Large Language Models are Learnable Planners for Long-Term Recommendation (2024) Preference Alignment and Optimization 51 DLCRec: A Novel Approach for Managing Diversity in LLM-Based Recommender Systems (2025) Preference Alignment and Optimization |
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| 32 | Bo Peng 0009 | 51 | 3 | 54 M2: Mixed Models With Preferences, Popularities and Transitions for Next-Basket Recommendation (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 50 $\mathop {\mathtt {HAM}}$HAM: Hybrid Associations Models for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 33 | Yongjing Hao | 51 | 3 | 69 Meta-Optimized Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 52 Feature-Level Deeper Self-Attention Network With Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 34 | Lianghao Xia | 50 | 3 | 60 RecGPT: A Foundation Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 57 DiffKG: Knowledge Graph Diffusion Model for Recommendation (2024) Knowledge Graph Embedding and Completion |
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| 35 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 50 | 3 | 65 Disentangled Contrastive Bundle Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 43 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 36 | Junjie Zhang 0009 | 50 | 3 | 53 Curriculum-scheduled knowledge distillation from multiple pre-trained teachers for multi-domain sequential recommendation (2025) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation 50 Frequency-Augmented Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts Framework for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |