Contrastive enhanced slide filter mixer for sequential recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to model user preferences by capturing behavior patterns from their item historical interaction data. Most existing methods model user preference in the time domain, omitting the fact that users' behaviors are also influenced by various frequency patterns that are difficult to separate in the entangled chronological items. However, few attempts have been made to train SR in the frequency domain, and it is still unclear how to use the frequency components to learn an appropriate representation for the user. To solve this problem, we shift the viewpoint to the frequency domain and propose a novel Contrastive Enhanced SLIde Filter MixEr for Sequential Recommendation, named SLIME4Rec. Specifically, we design a frequency ramp structure to allow the learnable filter slide on the frequency spectrums across different layers to capture different frequency patterns. Moreover, a Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) and a Static Frequency Split (SFS) module are proposed to replace the self-attention module for effectively extracting frequency information in two ways. DFS is used to select helpful frequency components dynamically, and SFS is combined with the dynamic frequency selection module to provide a more fine-grained frequency division. Finally, contrastive learning is utilized to improve the quality of user embedding learned from the frequency domain. Extensive experiments conducted on five widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate our proposed model performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/sudaada/SLIME4Rec.