Set-Based Cross-Domain Recommendation
Abstract
Cross-domain recommendation is a well-known technique for improving recommendations in a target domain, especially under sparse data or cold-start conditions. A common strategy is to train user embeddings separately in the source and target domains and learn a transfer function between them. In contrast, we propose SetCDR, which constructs more effective user representations in the target domain by directly incorporating each user's source and target history. We additionally introduce a lightweight domain indicator that preserves data–domain relational information. These histories, composed of item–rating pairs, are represented as variable-length sets and processed using a permutation-invariant neural architecture. This differs from conventional neural networks, which do not naturally handle unordered inputs, and is well suited to recommender systems where user history sizes vary greatly among users. The use of a permutation-invariant architecture ensures consistent embeddings regardless of input order, improving robustness to real-world variability and training efficiency. We demonstrate SetCDR in two forms: a simple sum-pooling method and an extended multihead attention–based method that captures more complex dependencies within user histories. Moreover, because SetCDR operates directly on sets of user history records, it provides a natural way to examine how histories influence user representations. Finally, SetCDR adapts immediately to new interactions without additional retraining, enabling on-the-fly performance improvement. Experimental results across multiple cross-domain benchmarks confirm that SetCDR consistently outperforms strong baselines in recommendation quality.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hao Liu 0078 | 64 | 100 DA-DAN: A Dual Adversarial Domain Adaption Network for Unsupervised Non-overlapping Cross-domain Recommendation (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 86 MCRPL: A Pretrain, Prompt, and Fine-tune Paradigm for Non-overlapping Many-to-one Cross-domain Recommendation (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 50 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 2 | Jiangxia Cao | 64 | 100 DisenCDR: Learning Disentangled Representations for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2022) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 100 Cross-Domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users via Variational Information Bottleneck (2022) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 100 Disentangled Representations Learning for Multi-target Cross-domain Recommendation (2023) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 3 | Yong He 0009 | 61 | 100 The Devil is in the Sources! Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Domain Recommendation in an Information Bottleneck Perspective (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 100 Uncertainty-based Heterogeneous Privileged Knowledge Distillation for Recommendation System (2023) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 100 Learning to Select Instance: Simultaneous Transfer Learning and Clustering (2021) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 57 |
Area-chair candidates (6)
| Weiming Liu 0005 assigned | 57 | 8 papers | |
| Leyu Lin | 56 | 15 papers | |
| Yanan Niu | 45 | 15 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 43 | 5 papers | |
| Xiaoyi Zeng | 43 | 11 papers | |
| Xin Xin 0003 | 42 | 10 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hao Liu 0078 assigned | 64 | 3 | 100 DA-DAN: A Dual Adversarial Domain Adaption Network for Unsupervised Non-overlapping Cross-domain Recommendation (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 86 MCRPL: A Pretrain, Prompt, and Fine-tune Paradigm for Non-overlapping Many-to-one Cross-domain Recommendation (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 2 | Jiangxia Cao assigned | 64 | 3 | 100 DisenCDR: Learning Disentangled Representations for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2022) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 100 Cross-Domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users via Variational Information Bottleneck (2022) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 3 | Yong He 0009 assigned | 61 | 3 | 100 The Devil is in the Sources! Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Domain Recommendation in an Information Bottleneck Perspective (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 100 Uncertainty-based Heterogeneous Privileged Knowledge Distillation for Recommendation System (2023) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 6 | Ke Wang 0038 | 52 | 3 | 69 Contrastive Multi-view Interest Learning for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 60 Disentangled Contrastive Learning for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 7 | Ke Fei | 51 | 3 | 67 Sharpness-Consistent Cross-Domain Recommendation for Cold-Start Items (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 56 Stable and Adaptive Fusion for Multi-domain Multi-task Recommendation (2026) Multi-Scenario and Multi-Domain CTR Prediction |
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| 8 | Qiang Luo 0004 | 51 | 3 | 100 FARM: Frequency-Aware Model for Cross-Domain Live-Streaming Recommendation (2026) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 51 One Model to Serve All: Star Topology Adaptive Recommender for Multi-Domain CTR Prediction (2021) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction |
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| 9 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 49 | 3 | 75 Multifaceted Relation-aware Meta-learning with Dual Customization for User Cold-start Recommendation (2023) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 74 Disentangled Contrastive Learning for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2023) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 10 | Jinxin Hu | 48 | 3 | 61 Scenario-Adaptive and Self-Supervised Model for Multi-Scenario Personalized Recommendation (2022) Multi-Scenario and Multi-Domain CTR Prediction 61 Global-Distribution Aware Scenario-Specific Variational Representation Learning Framework (2025) Multi-Scenario and Multi-Domain CTR Prediction |
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| 11 | Junwei Pan | 48 | 3 | 86 Crocodile: Cross Experts Covariance for Disentangled Learning in Multi-Domain Recommendation (2025) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 72 Decoupled Training: Return of Frustratingly Easy Multi-Domain Learning (2024) Multi-Domain and Multi-Market Recommendation |
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| 12 | Riwei Lai | 45 | 3 | 62 Proxy-enhanced cross-domain sequential recommendation (2025) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation 59 Proxy-Aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2023) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation |
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| 14 | Lantao Hu | 45 | 3 | 72 Tag Tree-Guided Multi-grained Alignment for Multi-Domain Short Video Recommendation (2024) Multi-Domain and Multi-Market Recommendation 50 Soft Contrastive Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 15 | Lichan Hong | 44 | 3 | 60 Enhancing Online Ranking Systems via Multi-Surface Co-Training for Content Understanding (2025) Content-Based Transferable Recommendation 51 DSelect-k: Differentiable Selection in the Mixture of Experts with Applications to Multi-Task Learning (2021) Multi-Task and Multi-Objective Optimization |
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| 16 | Yongxin Ni | 44 | 3 | 52 Multi-Modality is All You Need for Transferable Recommender Systems (2024) Multimodal Generative Recommendation 52 An Image Dataset for Benchmarking Recommender Systems with Raw Pixels (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation |
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| 17 | Ed H. Chi | 44 | 3 | 59 Zero-Shot Heterogeneous Transfer Learning from Recommender Systems to Cold-Start Search Retrieval (2020) Search and Recommendation Integration 52 Fresh Content Needs More Attention: Multi-funnel Fresh Content Recommendation (2023) Content and Attribute-Based Cold-Start Recommendation |
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| 19 | Jieming Zhu | 43 | 3 | 49 Directional Adversarial Training for Recommender Systems (2020) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift 46 EAGER: Two-Stream Generative Recommender with Behavior-Semantic Collaboration (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 20 | Bo Chen 0023 | 43 | 3 | 61 PLATE: A Prompt-Enhanced Paradigm for Multi-Scenario Recommendations (2023) Multi-Scenario and Multi-Domain CTR Prediction 45 Generative Representational Learning of Foundation Models for Recommendation (2026) Generative Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 21 | Yupeng Hou | 43 | 3 | 51 Learning Vector-Quantized Item Representation for Transferable Sequential Recommenders (2023) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 48 Towards Universal Sequence Representation Learning for Recommender Systems (2022) Text Embedding and Representation Learning |
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| 22 | Hao Deng 0011 | 43 | 3 | 47 MMQ: Multimodal Mixture-of-Quantization Tokenization for Semantic ID Generation and User Behavioral Adaptation (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 45 HeterRec: Heterogeneous Information Transformer for Scalable Sequential Recommendation (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 24 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 43 | 3 | 47 Enhancing Graph Contrastive Learning with Reliable and Informative Augmentation for Recommendation (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 45 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 25 | Yinwei Wei | 43 | 3 | 56 Equivariant Learning for Out-of-Distribution Cold-start Recommendation (2023) Content-Based Transferable Recommendation 48 Online Distillation-enhanced Multi-modal Transformer for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 26 | Qijiong Liu | 42 | 3 | 49 RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation (2025) Generative Retrieval and Recommendation Architectures 49 Multimodal Pretraining, Adaptation, and Generation for Recommendation: A Survey (2024) Multimodal Generative Recommendation |
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| 27 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 42 | 3 | 62 MergeRec: Model Merging for Data-Isolated Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2026) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation 43 Temporal Linear Item-Item Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 28 | Min Hou 0004 | 42 | 3 | 56 GoRec: A Generative Cold-start Recommendation Framework (2023) Content-Based Transferable Recommendation 51 Unified Representation Learning for Discrete Attribute Enhanced Completely Cold-Start Recommendation (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 30 | Yang Song 0008 | 42 | 3 | 62 Mixed Attention Network for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (2024) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation 49 Inverse Learning with Extremely Sparse Feedback for Recommendation (2024) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift |
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| 31 | Lianghao Xia | 42 | 3 | 47 Automated Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 47 LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 32 | Wei Guo 0006 | 42 | 3 | 48 Intent-aware Multi-source Contrastive Alignment for Tag-enhanced Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 44 Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Unifying Retrieval and Ranking with a Single Generative Recommendation Model (2025) Generative Retrieval and Ranking |
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| 33 | Fei Sun 0001 | 42 | 3 | 51 Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2022) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 49 Accelerating the Surrogate Retraining for Poisoning Attacks against Recommender Systems (2024) Robustness to Noise and Distribution Shift |
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| 34 | Yu Zhang 0206 | 42 | 3 | 56 Global-Distribution Aware Scenario-Specific Variational Representation Learning Framework (2025) Multi-Scenario and Multi-Domain CTR Prediction 56 Scenario-Adaptive Fine-Grained Personalization Network: Tailoring User Behavior Representation to the Scenario Context (2024) Multi-Scenario and Multi-Domain CTR Prediction |
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| 35 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 42 | 3 | 56 M3oE: Multi-Domain Multi-Task Mixture-of Experts Recommendation Framework (2024) Multi-Scenario and Multi-Domain CTR Prediction 47 Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 36 | Mengyuan Jing | 41 | 3 | 50 Dual-Adaptive Update Strategies-Enhanced Meta-Optimization for User Cold-Start Recommendation (2025) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation 50 Task-Difficulty-Aware Meta-Learning with Adaptive Update Strategies for User Cold-Start Recommendation (2023) Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation |