AsarRec: Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Self-supervised Sequential Recommendation
Abstract
Real-world user behaviors are often noisy due to factors such as human errors, uncertainty, and behavioral ambiguity, which can lead to degraded recommendation performance. To address this issue, recent approaches widely adopt self-supervised learning (SSL), particularly contrastive learning, by generating perturbed views of user interaction sequences and maximizing their mutual information to improve model robustness. However, these methods heavily rely on their pre-defined static augmentation strategies~(where the augmentation type remains fixed once chosen) to construct augmented views, leading to two critical challenges: (1) the optimal augmentation type can vary significantly across different scenarios; (2) inappropriate augmentations may even degrade recommendation performance, limiting the effectiveness of SSL. To overcome these limitations, we propose an adaptive augmentation framework. We first unify existing basic augmentation operations into a unified formulation via structured transformation matrices. Building on this formulation, we introduce AsarRec, an Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Sequential Recommendation. To enable stable end-to-end optimization of discrete and strongly constrained augmentations, AsarRec learns to generate transformation matrices by encoding user sequences into probabilistic transition matrices and projecting them into hard semi-doubly stochastic matrices via a differentiable Semi-Sinkhorn algorithm. To ensure that the learned augmentations benefit downstream performance, we jointly optimize three objectives: diversity (encouraging distinct views), semantic invariance (preserving semantic consistency among views), and informativeness (identifying augmentations most beneficial to recommendation). Extensive experiments on four benchmarks under varying noise levels validate the effectiveness of AsarRec, demonstrating its superior robustness and consistent improvements.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yongjing Hao | 55 | 77 Edge-enhanced Global Disentangled Graph Neural Network for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 77 Multi-dimensional Graph Neural Network for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 73 Learnable Model Augmentation Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 2 | Hyunsik Yoo | 50 | 54 Mixture of Sequence: Theme-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Long-Sequence Recommendation (2026) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation 53 Capturing User Interests from Data Streams for Continual Sequential Recommendation (2026) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 53 Generalizable Recommender System During Temporal Popularity Distribution Shifts (2025) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift |
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| 3 | Lingling Yi | 47 | 73 Hierarchical Graph Information Bottleneck for Multi-Behavior Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 65 Item-Provider Co-learning for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 48 PRECISE: Pre-training and Fine-tuning Sequential Recommenders with Collaborative and Semantic Information (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Yanan Niu | 57 |
Area-chair candidates (7)
| Yanan Niu assigned | 57 | 15 papers | |
| Xin Xin 0003 | 56 | 10 papers | |
| Leyu Lin | 51 | 15 papers | |
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 47 | 8 papers | |
| Qiaoyu Tan | 47 | 7 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 47 | 5 papers | |
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 44 | 15 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fei Sun 0001 COI: author | 59 | 3 | 75 Multi-Behavior Sequential Modeling with Transition-Aware Graph Attention Network for E-Commerce Recommendation (2026) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 69 LoRec: Combating Poisons with Large Language Model for Robust Sequential Recommendation (2024) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift |
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| 4 | Jianling Wang | 56 | 3 | 75 Next-item Recommendation with Sequential Hypergraphs (2020) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 75 Session-based Recommendation with Hypergraph Attention Networks (2021) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 5 | Yongjing Hao assigned | 55 | 3 | 77 Edge-enhanced Global Disentangled Graph Neural Network for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 77 Multi-dimensional Graph Neural Network for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 6 | Hao Liu 0078 | 52 | 3 | 67 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 50 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 7 | Chen Wang 0052 | 51 | 3 | 58 Confidence-Aware Fine-Tuning of Sequential Recommendation Systems Via Conformal Prediction (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 54 Sequential Recommendation with Auxiliary Item Relationships via Multi-Relational Transformer (2022) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation |
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| 9 | Hyunsik Yoo assigned | 50 | 3 | 54 Mixture of Sequence: Theme-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Long-Sequence Recommendation (2026) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation 53 Capturing User Interests from Data Streams for Continual Sequential Recommendation (2026) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 10 | Lantao Hu | 50 | 3 | 62 Modeling User Fatigue for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 57 Natural Language Explainable Recommendation with Robustness Enhancement (2024) Explainable and Causal Recommendation |
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| 11 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 50 | 3 | 67 A Generic Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation with Distribution Shifts (2023) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 49 LLaRA: Large Language-Recommendation Assistant (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 12 | Mengyuan Jing | 50 | 3 | 72 Dual Contrastive Learning for Multi-Behavior Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 55 Recognizing Semantics-Consistent Subsequences for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation |
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| 13 | Yang Song 0008 COI: co-author | 50 | 3 | 77 Sequential Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks (2021) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 54 Mixed Attention Network for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (2024) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 14 | Bo Peng 0009 | 50 | 3 | 54 M2: Mixed Models With Preferences, Popularities and Transitions for Next-Basket Recommendation (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 54 Modeling Sequences as Star Graphs to Address Over-Smoothing in Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation (2024) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation |
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| 15 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 49 | 3 | 75 Graph Diffusion-Based Representation Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 63 Learning Graph-based Disentangled Representations for Next POI Recommendation (2022) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 16 | Riwei Lai | 49 | 3 | 54 Proxy-Aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2023) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation 54 Proxy-enhanced cross-domain sequential recommendation (2025) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 17 | Lianghao Xia | 48 | 3 | 74 Multi-Behavior Hypergraph-Enhanced Transformer for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 66 Graph Masked Autoencoder for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 18 | James Caverlee | 48 | 3 | 75 Next-item Recommendation with Sequential Hypergraphs (2020) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 75 Session-based Recommendation with Hypergraph Attention Networks (2021) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 19 | Miaomiao Cai 0001 | 48 | 3 | 62 RMBRec: Robust Multi-Behavior Recommendation towards Target Behaviors (2026) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift 45 Mitigating Recommendation Biases via Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity in Representation Learning (2024) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation |
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| 20 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 48 | 3 | 53 Temporal Linear Item-Item Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 50 MUFFIN: Mixture of User-Adaptive Frequency Filtering for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 22 | Jin Chen 0008 | 47 | 3 | 53 Dual Test-Time Training for Out-of-Distribution Recommender System (2025) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift 49 Enhancing Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommenders with Behavior-Aware Regularization (2025) Multi-Behavior Recommendation |
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| 23 | Lingling Yi assigned | 47 | 3 | 73 Hierarchical Graph Information Bottleneck for Multi-Behavior Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 65 Item-Provider Co-learning for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 24 | Jieming Zhu | 47 | 3 | 54 EAGER: Two-Stream Generative Recommender with Behavior-Semantic Collaboration (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 53 Directional Adversarial Training for Recommender Systems (2020) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift |
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| 27 | Wei Guo 0006 | 46 | 3 | 74 Compressed Interaction Graph based Framework for Multi-behavior Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 49 Breaking the Bottleneck: User-Specific Optimization and Real-Time Inference Integration for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 28 | Shuchang Liu 0001 COI: co-author | 46 | 3 | 58 DLCRec: A Novel Approach for Managing Diversity in LLM-Based Recommender Systems (2025) Preference Alignment and Optimization 57 Distinguished Quantized Guidance for Diffusion-based Sequence Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 29 | Ke Wang 0038 | 46 | 3 | 60 Contrastive Multi-view Interest Learning for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 47 LLM-Grounded Diffusion for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 30 | Yongxin Ni | 45 | 3 | 74 Global and Personalized Graphs for Heterogeneous Sequential Recommendation by Learning Behavior Transitions and User Intentions (2022) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 59 Bridging NIP and MLM: A Unified Meta-Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation (2026) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 31 | Min Hou 0004 | 45 | 3 | 67 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 51 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 32 | Dongxiao He | 45 | 3 | 58 Reliable Data Augmented Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 49 Attribute Association Driven Multi-Task Learning for Session-based Recommendation (2025) Multi-Task and Multi-Objective Optimization |
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| 33 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 45 | 3 | 53 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 50 Reciprocal Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 34 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 45 | 3 | 60 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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| 35 | Bo Chen 0023 COI: co-author | 45 | 3 | 73 Compressed Interaction Graph based Framework for Multi-behavior Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 51 Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 36 | Xin Zhang 0091 | 45 | 3 | 51 Deep Dynamic Interest Learning With Session Local and Global Consistency for Click-Through Rate Predictions (2022) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction 51 Deep Session Heterogeneity-Aware Network for Click Through Rate Prediction (2024) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction |