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Countering Interest Over-Smoothing: Distilling Latent Factors via Diffusion for Multi-Interest Retrieval

sigir26-211 · Full research paper · Yankun Le, Fu Zhang, Haoran Li, Baoyuan Ou, Yingjie Qin, Zhixuan Yang, Ruilong Su
Diffusion and Flow Recommenders · 50% Others · 50%
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

#ReviewerMatchWhy (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
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
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 chairMatch
Dacheng Tao 43
Area-chair candidates (3)
Dacheng Tao assigned 435 papers
Ge Li 0001 424 papers
Maolin Wang 0001 4015 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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