Countering Interest Over-Smoothing: Distilling Latent Factors via Diffusion for Multi-Interest Retrieval
Abstract
Multi-interest recommendation is essential for the matching stage. By generating multiple user representations, it can better cover the diverse interests derived from user interaction history. Ideally, multi-interest models should effectively identify the underlying latent factors — the specific themes, intents, or preferences — within historical behaviors. However, conventional methods typically rely on weighted aggregation (e.g., Attention), which we argue leads to over-smoothed representations. This aggregation dilutes the intensity of significant patterns that appear only locally, blending them into a blurry average. To address this, we propose DMI, a model-agnostic diffusion framework that distills precise interests by amplifying co-occurring latent factors across behaviors. Distinct from prior diffusion works that reconstruct the single next item—which risks collapsing diverse interests—DMI reconstructs the interest vectors themselves to preserve their distributional independence. To support this, we introduce a cross-transformer module that adaptively extracts interest-specific information from designated historical interactions, transforming the diffusion process from an unconditional one into a guided, interest-disentangled pathway. In addition, we design a gradient back-propagation strategy to decouple the joint optimization of the reconstruction and recommendation losses, thereby improving training stability. Extensive offline experiments demonstrate DMI's superiority over existing methods, achieving an average relative improvement of 11.2% across all metrics on Amazon Books datasets while increasing recommendation diversity by 11.8%. Successfully deployed in a real-world recommender system, DMI effectively enhances user satisfaction and system performance at scale, serving the major traffic of hundreds of millions of daily active users.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Julian J. McAuley | 52 | 57 A Review of Modern Recommender Systems Using Generative Models (Gen-RecSys) (2024) Generative Models for Recommendation and Content › Others 57 Tutorial on Recommendation with Generative Models (Gen-RecSys) (2025) Generative Models for Recommendation and Content › Others 55 Neighborhood-Based Collaborative Filtering for Conversational Recommendation (2024) Conversational Recommendation Systems |
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| 2 | Sajad Ebrahimi 0001 | 51 | 62 Diffusion-based generative modeling for expert team formation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 43 Reviewerly: Modeling the Reviewer Assignment Task as an Information Retrieval Problem (2024) Information Retrieval and Ranking › Others 43 exHarmony: Authorship and Citations for Benchmarking the Reviewer Assignment Problem (2025) Information Retrieval and Ranking › Others |
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| 3 | Maryam Amirizaniani | 47 | 43 How Does Memorization Impact LLMs' Social Reasoning? An Assessment using Seen and Unseen Queries (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness 40 Enhancing AI Agents with Human Theory of Mind (ToM) for Context-Aware Actions (2025) Search Agents and LLM Reasoning › Others 40 Can LLMs Reason Like Humans? Assessing Theory of Mind Reasoning in LLMs for Open-Ended Questions (2024) Search Agents and LLM Reasoning › Others |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Dacheng Tao | 43 |
Area-chair candidates (3)
| Dacheng Tao assigned | 43 | 5 papers | |
| Ge Li 0001 | 42 | 4 papers | |
| Maolin Wang 0001 | 40 | 15 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Julian J. McAuley assigned | 52 | 3 | 57 A Review of Modern Recommender Systems Using Generative Models (Gen-RecSys) (2024) Generative Models for Recommendation and Content › Others 57 Tutorial on Recommendation with Generative Models (Gen-RecSys) (2025) Generative Models for Recommendation and Content › Others |
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| 2 | Sajad Ebrahimi 0001 assigned | 51 | 3 | 62 Diffusion-based generative modeling for expert team formation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 43 Reviewerly: Modeling the Reviewer Assignment Task as an Information Retrieval Problem (2024) Information Retrieval and Ranking › Others |
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| 3 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 51 | 3 | 62 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 62 On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 4 | Shijie Wang 0002 | 48 | 3 | 62 Continuous-time Discrete-space Diffusion Model for Recommendation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 59 Score-Based Generative Diffusion Models for Social Recommendations (2025) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 5 | Maryam Amirizaniani assigned | 47 | 3 | 43 How Does Memorization Impact LLMs' Social Reasoning? An Assessment using Seen and Unseen Queries (2025) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness 40 Enhancing AI Agents with Human Theory of Mind (ToM) for Context-Aware Actions (2025) Search Agents and LLM Reasoning › Others |
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| 6 | Gyuseok Lee | 47 | 3 | 42 Harmonic Dataset Distillation for Time Series Forecasting (2026) Others 38 Capturing User Interests from Data Streams for Continual Sequential Recommendation (2026) Efficient Sequential Recommendation Architectures |
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| 7 | Lantao Hu | 46 | 3 | 72 Content-Boosted Restricted Boltzmann Machine for Recommendation (2014) Content-Based Transferable Recommendation 62 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 8 | Fangzhou Yao | 46 | 3 | 46 FedJudge: Federated Legal Large Language Model (2024) LLMs for Recommendation and Personalization › Others 42 Collaborative Cognitive Diagnosis with Disentangled Representation Learning for Learner Modeling (2024) Others |
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| 9 | Xinhang Li 0001 | 44 | 3 | 42 Towards Automatic ICD Coding via Knowledge Enhanced Multi-Task Learning (2023) Others 41 OpenSiteRec: An Open Dataset for Site Recommendation (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 10 | Hung Vinh Tran | 44 | 3 | 41 LODENet: A Holistic Approach to Offline Handwritten Chinese and Japanese Text Line Recognition (2020) Multimodal and Cross-Modal Retrieval › Others 40 A Thorough Performance Benchmarking on Lightweight Embedding-based Recommender Systems (2025) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 11 | Jianghong Ma | 44 | 3 | 42 Latent Topic-Aware Multi-label Classification (2020) Others 42 Multilabel Classification With Label-Specific Features and Classifiers: A Coarse- and Fine-Tuned Framework (2021) Others |
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| 12 | Yuanzhao Zhai | 43 | 3 | 42 Correcting Large Language Model Behavior via Influence Function (2025) Others 42 Preference-Strength-Aware Self-Improving Alignment with Generative Preference Models (2025) Others |
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| 13 | Yong Li 0004 | 43 | 3 | 43 Code-Based English Models Reveal Surprising Performance on Chinese QA Pair Extraction Task (2026) Question Answering and Reading Comprehension › Others 42 Consistency maintenance in real-time collaborative image editing systems (2003) Others |
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| 15 | Xialong Liu | 43 | 3 | 68 S-Diff: An Anisotropic Diffusion Model for Collaborative Filtering in Spectral Domain (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 60 Expert-Guided Diffusion Planner for Auto-Bidding (2025) Advertising and Auction Mechanisms |
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| 16 | Fei Sun 0001 | 43 | 3 | 62 Explore User Neighborhood for Real-time E-commerce Recommendation (2021) Collaborative Filtering and Graph-Based Recommendation › Others 43 Personalized re-ranking for recommendation (2019) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 17 | Zhe Xu 0009 | 42 | 3 | 42 Attention Basin: Why Contextual Position Matters in Large Language Models (2026) Text Representation and Language Models › Others 42 Compress to One Point: Neural Collapse for Pre-Trained Model-Based Class-Incremental Learning (2025) Others |
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| 18 | Mingdai Yang | 42 | 3 | 42 Deep Reinforcement Learning of Volume-Guided Progressive View Inpainting for 3D Point Scene Completion From a Single Depth Image (2019) Others 42 A Hybrid Optical-Electrical Analog Deep Learning Accelerator Using Incoherent Optical Signals (2021) Others |
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| 19 | Yang Zhang 0072 | 42 | 3 | 46 Large Language Models for Recommendation: Past, Present, and Future (2024) LLMs for Recommendation and Personalization › Others 46 Navigating Large Language Models for Recommendation: From Architecture to Learning Paradigms and Deployment (2025) LLMs for Recommendation and Personalization › Others |
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| 20 | Amir Ingber | 42 | 3 | 42 Compressing Tabular Data via Pairwise Dependencies (2017) Others 41 Compression Schemes for Similarity Queries (2014) Efficient Retrieval and Indexing Systems › Others |
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| 21 | Jiancan Wu | 42 | 3 | 86 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 75 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 22 | Wenlin Zhang 0001 | 42 | 3 | 42 Robust kernel principal component analysis with optimal mean (2022) Others 41 Graph Convolution RPCA With Adaptive Graph (2022) Graph Neural Networks for Web and Recommendation › Others |
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| 24 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 42 | 3 | 64 Disentangled Contrastive Bundle Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 34 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 25 | Han Li 0005 | 42 | 3 | 67 DiffusionGS: Generative Search with Query Conditioned Diffusion in Kuaishou (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 43 Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 26 | Jimeng Sun 0001 | 42 | 3 | 46 Small Models are LLM Knowledge Triggers for Medical Tabular Prediction (2025) LLMs for Recommendation and Personalization › Others 44 Vision Language Model is NOT All You Need: Augmentation Strategies for Molecule Language Models (2024) Multimodal Large Language Models › Others |
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| 27 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 42 | 3 | 63 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 62 Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 28 | Bo Peng 0009 | 42 | 3 | 74 Hybrid collaborative filtering methods for recommending search terms to clinicians (2021) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 38 M2: Mixed Models With Preferences, Popularities and Transitions for Next-Basket Recommendation (2023) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 29 | Ching Law | 42 | 3 | 62 MoFu: Scale-Aware Modulation and Fourier Fusion for Multi-Subject Video Generation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 62 Uni-Layout: Integrating Human Feedback in Unified Layout Generation and Evaluation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 30 | Ziru Liu | 41 | 3 | 62 Diff-MSR: A Diffusion Model Enhanced Paradigm for Cold-Start Multi-Scenario Recommendation (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 42 KINDLE: Knowledge-Guided Distillation for Prior-Free Gene Regulatory Network Inference (2025) Others |
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| 31 | Romain Deffayet | 41 | 3 | 42 Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Dual Expectile-Quantile Regression (2025) Others 42 Disentangled Object-Centric Image Representation for Robotic Manipulation (2025) Others |
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| 32 | Miaomiao Cai 0001 | 41 | 3 | 42 Breaking student-concept sparsity barrier for cognitive diagnosis (2025) Others 39 Graph-Structured Driven Dual Adaptation for Mitigating Popularity Bias (2026) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation |