TimeMM: Time-as-Operator Spectral Filtering for Dynamic Multimodal Recommendation
Abstract
Multimodal recommendation improves user modeling by integrating collaborative signals with heterogeneous item content. In real applications, user interests evolve over time and exhibit nonstationary dynamics, where different preference factors change at different rates. This challenge is amplified in multimodal settings because visual and textual cues can dominate decisions under different temporal regimes. Despite strong progress, most multimodal recommenders still rely on static interaction graphs or coarse temporal heuristics, which limits their ability to model continuous preference evolution with fine-grained temporal adaptation. To address these limitations, we propose TimeMM, a time-conditioned spectral filtering framework for dynamic multimodal recommendation. TimeMM instantiates Time-as-Operator by mapping interaction recency to a family of parametric temporal kernels that reweight edges on the user--item graph, producing component-specific representations without explicit eigendecomposition. To capture non-stationary interests, we introduce Adaptive Spectral Filtering that mixes the operator bank according to temporal context, yielding prediction-specific effective spectral responses. To account for modality-specific temporal sensitivity, we further propose Spectral-Aware Modality Routing that calibrates visual and textual contributions conditioned on the same temporal context. Finally, a ranking-space Spectral Diversity Regularization encourages complementary expert behaviors and prevents filter-bank collapse. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that TimeMM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal recommenders while maintaining linear-time scalability.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Xin Zhang 0091 | 50 | 64 Multi-Modal Correction Network for Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Denoising and Robustness 47 Deep Dynamic Interest Learning With Session Local and Global Consistency for Click-Through Rate Predictions (2022) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction 47 Deep Session Heterogeneity-Aware Network for Click Through Rate Prediction (2024) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction |
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| 2 | Noveen Sachdeva | 45 | 61 Attentive neural architecture incorporating song features for music recommendation (2018) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information 53 Explicit Modelling of the Implicit Short Term User Preferences for Music Recommendation (2018) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 45 How Useful are Reviews for Recommendation? A Critical Review and Potential Improvements (2020) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Xin Xin 0003 | 46 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Xin Xin 0003 assigned | 46 | 10 papers | |
| Leyu Lin | 44 | 15 papers | |
| Yanan Niu | 44 | 15 papers | |
| Kun Gai COI: co-author | 44 | 5 papers | |
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 43 | 15 papers | |
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 43 | 8 papers | |
| Xiaoyi Zeng | 40 | 11 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bo Peng 0009 | 55 | 3 | 62 Multi-modality meets re-learning: mitigating negative transfer in sequential recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information 53 $\mathop {\mathtt {HAM}}$HAM: Hybrid Associations Models for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 2 | Hao Deng 0011 | 50 | 3 | 64 ESANS: Effective and Semantic-Aware Negative Sampling for Large-Scale Retrieval Systems (2025) Multimodal Denoising and Robustness 64 HeterRec: Heterogeneous Information Transformer for Scalable Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 3 | Fei Sun 0001 | 50 | 3 | 56 Intent Preference Decoupling for User Representation on Online Recommender System (2020) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 54 SDM: Sequential Deep Matching Model for Online Large-scale Recommender System (2019) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation |
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| 4 | Xin Zhang 0091 assigned | 50 | 3 | 64 Multi-Modal Correction Network for Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Denoising and Robustness 47 Deep Dynamic Interest Learning With Session Local and Global Consistency for Click-Through Rate Predictions (2022) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction |
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| 5 | Yongxin Ni | 49 | 3 | 58 Online Distillation-enhanced Multi-modal Transformer for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 57 Teach Me How to Denoise: A Universal Framework for Denoising Multi-modal Recommender Systems via Guided Calibration (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 6 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 48 | 3 | 53 Reciprocal Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 49 Bridging Textual-Collaborative Gap through Semantic Codes for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 7 | Qiang Luo 0004 | 48 | 3 | 53 FIM: Frequency-Aware Multi-View Interest Modeling for Local-Life Service Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 47 MPFormer: Adaptive Framework for Industrial Multi-Task Personalized Sequential Retriever (2025) Multi-Task and Multi-Objective Optimization |
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| 8 | Yinwei Wei | 48 | 3 | 65 Breaking Isolation: Multimodal Graph Fusion for Multimedia Recommendation by Edge-wise Modulation (2022) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 65 MGAT: Multimodal Graph Attention Network for Recommendation (2020) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 9 | Jianling Wang | 47 | 3 | 56 Sequential Recommendation for Cold-start Users with Meta Transitional Learning (2021) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 53 Recurrent Recommendation with Local Coherence (2019) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 11 | Jinxin Hu | 46 | 3 | 71 ESANS: Effective and Semantic-Aware Negative Sampling for Large-Scale Retrieval Systems (2025) Multimodal Denoising and Robustness 53 SASNet: Stage-aware Sequential Matching for Online Travel Recommendation (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 12 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 46 | 3 | 54 Temporal Linear Item-Item Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 53 MUFFIN: Mixture of User-Adaptive Frequency Filtering for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 13 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 45 | 3 | 49 Multi-view Semantic Contrastive Alignment for Multimodal Recommendation (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 39 Disentangled Contrastive Bundle Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 14 | Noveen Sachdeva assigned | 45 | 3 | 61 Attentive neural architecture incorporating song features for music recommendation (2018) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information 53 Explicit Modelling of the Implicit Short Term User Preferences for Music Recommendation (2018) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 15 | Junchen Fu | 45 | 3 | 57 Teach Me How to Denoise: A Universal Framework for Denoising Multi-modal Recommender Systems via Guided Calibration (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 56 Bridging NIP and MLM: A Unified Meta-Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation (2026) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 16 | Junwei Pan | 44 | 3 | 64 Multi-Sequence Attentive User Representation Learning for Side-information Integrated Sequential Recommendation (2024) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information 43 Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle: Empowering Sequential Recommendation with Large Language Models (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 18 | Qijiong Liu | 44 | 3 | 62 Lightweight Modality Adaptation to Sequential Recommendation via Correlation Supervision (2024) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information 45 Multimodal Pretraining, Adaptation, and Generation for Recommendation: A Survey (2024) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 20 | James Caverlee | 44 | 3 | 61 Consistency-Aware Recommendation for User-Generated Item List Continuation (2020) Multimodal Recommendation for Domain Applications 56 Sequential Recommendation for Cold-start Users with Meta Transitional Learning (2021) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 21 | Miaomiao Cai 0001 | 44 | 3 | 72 I3-MRec: Invariant Learning with Information Bottleneck for Incomplete Modality Recommendation (2025) Multimodal Denoising and Robustness 60 Multimodality Invariant Learning for Multimedia-Based New Item Recommendation (2024) Content and Attribute-Based Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 22 | Jiangxia Cao | 44 | 3 | 57 QARM: Quantitative Alignment Multi-Modal Recommendation at Kuaishou (2025) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 50 CDSRNP: Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation via Neural Process (2025) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation |
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| 23 | Wei Guo 0006 | 44 | 3 | 52 Dataset Regeneration for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 52 FuXi-γ: Efficient Sequential Recommendation with Exponential-Power Temporal Encoder and Diagonal-Sparse Positional Mechanism (2026) Efficient Sequential Recommendation Architectures |
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| 24 | Junjie Zhang 0009 | 44 | 3 | 55 Sequence-level Semantic Representation Fusion for Recommender Systems (2024) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information 53 Frequency-Augmented Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts Framework for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 26 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 44 | 3 | 56 MESA: Plugin Meta-Modulation for Transformer-Based Cold-Start Sequential Recommendation (2026) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 49 Guiding Graph Learning with Denoised Modality for Multi-modal Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 27 | Riwei Lai | 44 | 3 | 52 Proxy-Aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2023) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation 47 Multi-Faceted Global Item Relation Learning for Session-Based Recommendation (2022) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation |
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| 28 | Yongjing Hao | 44 | 3 | 56 Feature-Level Deeper Self-Attention Network With Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 48 Tell Me Where to Go Next: Improving POI Recommendation via Conversation (2021) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
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| 29 | Jie Jiang 0015 | 43 | 3 | 64 Multi-Sequence Attentive User Representation Learning for Side-information Integrated Sequential Recommendation (2024) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information 46 HIT: Learning a Hierarchical Tree-Based Model with Variable-Length Layers for Recommendation Systems (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 30 | Lantao Hu | 43 | 3 | 56 MODEM: Decoupling User Behavior for Shared-Account Video Recommendations on Large Screen Devices (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 56 Modeling User Fatigue for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 32 | Mengyuan Jing | 43 | 3 | 53 Recognizing Semantics-Consistent Subsequences for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation 53 Intent-Aware Cross Attention for Next POI Recommendation (2024) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 34 | Yang Song 0008 | 43 | 3 | 54 Learning and Optimization of Implicit Negative Feedback for Industrial Short-video Recommender System (2023) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation 51 Understanding and Modeling Passive-Negative Feedback for Short-video Sequential Recommendation (2023) Multi-Behavior Recommendation |
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| 35 | Jieming Zhu | 43 | 3 | 50 ROMA: Recommendation-Oriented Language Model Adaptation Using Multi-Modal Multi-Domain Item Sequences (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 45 FANS: Fast Non-Autoregressive Sequence Generation for Item List Continuation (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 36 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 42 | 3 | 53 Test-Time Alignment with State Space Model for Tracking User Interest Shifts in Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 45 Benefit from Rich: Tackling Search Interaction Sparsity in Search Enhanced Recommendation (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |