RecPFN: Prior-Fitted Networks for In-Context-Based Recommendations
Abstract
We introduce RecPFN, a prior-fitted network that brings in-context learning to sequential recommendation. RecPFN is pretrained entirely on synthetic clickstream environments sampled from a broad structural causal prior, enabling it to amortize Bayesian-style inference from a small support set. At inference, a lightweight decoder-only transformer conditions on a handful of domain sequences and produces next-item predictions for queries in a single forward pass, without any weight updates. Across eight public benchmarks, RecPFN achives state-of-the-art zero-shot performance while remaining strongly competitive with supervised methods in low-compute and low-data regimes. It is deployment-efficient and robust to domain shift, outperforming strong zero-shot baselines that rely on large real-interaction corpora. RecPFN provides a practical path toward generalizable, data-efficient recommenders and opens avenues for richer priors, longer-context ICL, and multimodal extensions. Code for training and evaluation will be made publicly available by the conference date.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 64 | 100 MESA: Plugin Meta-Modulation for Transformer-Based Cold-Start Sequential Recommendation (2026) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 74 A Preference Learning Decoupling Framework for User Cold-Start Recommendation (2023) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation 74 Adaptive Continual Learning with User-Incremental Forward Compatibility for Meta-Augmented Cold-Start Recommenders (2026) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 2 | Jianling Wang | 58 | 100 Sequential Recommendation for Cold-start Users with Meta Transitional Learning (2021) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 74 Recurrent Recommendation with Local Coherence (2019) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 63 A Hierarchical Self-Attentive Model for Recommending User-Generated Item Lists (2019) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 3 | James Caverlee | 51 | 100 Sequential Recommendation for Cold-start Users with Meta Transitional Learning (2021) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 66 Consistency-Aware Recommendation for User-Generated Item List Continuation (2020) Multimodal Recommendation for Domain Applications 55 Recommendation for New Users and New Items via Randomized Training and Mixture-of-Experts Transformation (2020) Content and Attribute-Based Cold-Start Recommendation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Leyu Lin | 53 |
Area-chair candidates (6)
| Leyu Lin assigned | 53 | 15 papers | |
| Yanan Niu | 52 | 15 papers | |
| Xin Xin 0003 | 52 | 10 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 50 | 5 papers | |
| Qiaoyu Tan | 47 | 7 papers | |
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 46 | 8 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chunyang Wang 0001 assigned | 64 | 3 | 100 MESA: Plugin Meta-Modulation for Transformer-Based Cold-Start Sequential Recommendation (2026) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 74 A Preference Learning Decoupling Framework for User Cold-Start Recommendation (2023) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 2 | Bo Peng 0009 | 61 | 3 | 74 HAM: Hybrid Associations Models for Sequential Recommendation (Extended abstract) (2023) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 74 $\mathop {\mathtt {HAM}}$HAM: Hybrid Associations Models for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 3 | Fei Sun 0001 | 59 | 3 | 100 Intent Preference Decoupling for User Representation on Online Recommender System (2020) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 74 SDM: Sequential Deep Matching Model for Online Large-scale Recommender System (2019) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation |
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| 4 | Jianling Wang assigned | 58 | 3 | 100 Sequential Recommendation for Cold-start Users with Meta Transitional Learning (2021) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 74 Recurrent Recommendation with Local Coherence (2019) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 5 | Mengyuan Jing | 54 | 3 | 75 Recognizing Semantics-Consistent Subsequences for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation 74 Intent-Aware Cross Attention for Next POI Recommendation (2024) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling |
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| 7 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 53 | 3 | 77 Temporal Linear Item-Item Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 74 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 | 53 | 3 | 74 Reciprocal Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 54 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 | 52 | 3 | 74 FIM: Frequency-Aware Multi-View Interest Modeling for Local-Life Service Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 57 MPFormer: Adaptive Framework for Industrial Multi-Task Personalized Sequential Retriever (2025) Multi-Task and Multi-Objective Optimization |
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| 12 | Jiangxia Cao | 52 | 3 | 78 CDSRNP: Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation via Neural Process (2025) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation 70 Personalized Multi-Interest Modeling for Cross-Domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users (2025) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 13 | Ke Wang 0038 | 51 | 3 | 74 Multifaceted Relation-aware Meta-learning with Dual Customization for User Cold-start Recommendation (2023) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation 74 A Preference Learning Decoupling Framework for User Cold-Start Recommendation (2023) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 14 | James Caverlee assigned | 51 | 3 | 100 Sequential Recommendation for Cold-start Users with Meta Transitional Learning (2021) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 66 Consistency-Aware Recommendation for User-Generated Item List Continuation (2020) Multimodal Recommendation for Domain Applications |
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| 15 | Lantao Hu | 50 | 3 | 75 Modeling User Fatigue for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 62 MODEM: Decoupling User Behavior for Shared-Account Video Recommendations on Large Screen Devices (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 16 | Wei Guo 0006 | 50 | 3 | 72 Dataset Regeneration for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 63 FuXi-γ: Efficient Sequential Recommendation with Exponential-Power Temporal Encoder and Diagonal-Sparse Positional Mechanism (2026) Efficient Sequential Recommendation Architectures |
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| 17 | Yong He 0009 | 50 | 3 | 73 Task Similarity Aware Meta Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation (2022) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation 70 DCBT: A Simple But Effective Way for Unified Warm and Cold Recommendation (2023) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction |
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| 19 | Jinxin Hu | 49 | 3 | 74 SASNet: Stage-aware Sequential Matching for Online Travel Recommendation (2022) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 52 CSMF: Cascaded Selective Mask Fine-Tuning for Multi-Objective Embedding-Based Retrieval (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 20 | Yongxin Ni | 48 | 3 | 90 Bridging NIP and MLM: A Unified Meta-Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation (2026) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation 54 An Image Dataset for Benchmarking Recommender Systems with Raw Pixels (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 21 | Hao Liu 0078 | 48 | 3 | 56 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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| 22 | Yang Song 0008 | 48 | 3 | 66 Learning and Optimization of Implicit Negative Feedback for Industrial Short-video Recommender System (2023) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation 66 Understanding and Modeling Passive-Negative Feedback for Short-video Sequential Recommendation (2023) Multi-Behavior Recommendation |
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| 23 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 48 | 3 | 54 Sequential Recommendation for Optimizing Both Immediate Feedback and Long-term Retention (2024) Multi-Behavior and Multi-Interest Sequential Recommendation 51 Distinguished Quantized Guidance for Diffusion-based Sequence Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 25 | Junwei Pan | 47 | 3 | 74 Multi-Sequence Attentive User Representation Learning for Side-information Integrated Sequential Recommendation (2024) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information 51 Empowering Large Language Model for Sequential Recommendation via Multimodal Embeddings and Semantic IDs (2025) Generative Recommendation and Item Tokenization |
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| 26 | Riwei Lai | 47 | 3 | 67 Proxy-Aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2023) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation 56 Proxy-enhanced cross-domain sequential recommendation (2025) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 27 | Jieming Zhu | 47 | 3 | 56 FANS: Fast Non-Autoregressive Sequence Generation for Item List Continuation (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation 52 ROMA: Recommendation-Oriented Language Model Adaptation Using Multi-Modal Multi-Domain Item Sequences (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 28 | Chen Wang 0052 | 47 | 3 | 59 Cluster-Aware Item Prompt Learning for Session-Based Recommendation (2025) LLM-Enhanced Sequential Recommendation 56 Sequential Recommendation with Auxiliary Item Relationships via Multi-Relational Transformer (2022) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation |
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| 29 | Noveen Sachdeva | 46 | 3 | 74 Explicit Modelling of the Implicit Short Term User Preferences for Music Recommendation (2018) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 57 Attentive neural architecture incorporating song features for music recommendation (2018) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information |
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| 30 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 46 | 3 | 56 A Generic Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation with Distribution Shifts (2023) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 50 LLaRA: Large Language-Recommendation Assistant (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 31 | Min Hou 0004 | 46 | 3 | 58 STGCN: A Spatial-Temporal Aware Graph Learning Method for POI Recommendation (2020) Graph Neural Network Architectures for CF 56 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 32 | Xiao Zhang 0034 | 46 | 3 | 74 Test-Time Alignment with State Space Model for Tracking User Interest Shifts in Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 54 When Search Meets Recommendation: Learning Disentangled Search Representation for Recommendation (2023) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 33 | Bo Chen 0023 | 46 | 3 | 55 ReLLa: Retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation 53 Full-Stack Optimized Large Language Models for Lifelong Sequential Behavior Comprehension in Recommendation (2026) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 34 | Yongjing Hao | 46 | 3 | 56 Feature-Level Deeper Self-Attention Network With Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 56 Tell Me Where to Go Next: Improving POI Recommendation via Conversation (2021) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
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| 36 | Junjie Zhang 0009 | 46 | 3 | 74 Frequency-Augmented Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts Framework for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Sequential Recommendation with User Modeling and Profiling 55 Sequence-level Semantic Representation Fusion for Recommender Systems (2024) Sequential Recommendation with Side and Multimodal Information |