Learning to Forget: Satiation-Aware Long-Sequence Transducers for Mitigating Post-Purchase Redundancy

Sequential recommendation models predominantly interpret user interactions as positive signals for preference accumulation. However, in e-commerce scenarios, a purchase action often signifies the termination of a specific intent ("Interest Exit") rather than its continuation. Existing models overlook this distinction, suffering from Action-Intent Asymmetry, which leads to severe post-purchase redundancy. In this paper, we propose the Satiation-Aware Mechanism (SAM), an end-to-end framework designed to explicitly model the lifecycle of user interests. SAM incorporates three key components: (1) A Dual-path Cross-Attention architecture that retroactively suppresses historical clicks associated with a fulfilled intent while simultaneously retrieving personalized replenishment rhythms from long-term purchase history; (2) An Adaptive Satiation Gating Unit (ASGU) that generates a time-sensitive soft mask to inhibit satisfied interests immediately after purchase and gradually "re-awaken" them as the predicted repurchase cycle approaches; and (3) A self-supervised Time-to-Next-Purchase (TTNP) auxiliary task to learn latent product lifecycles without manual annotation. Extensive offline experiments on industrial datasets and online A/B testing demonstrate that SAM significantly reduces the Post-Purchase Repeat Rate (PPRR) by over 60%.

Cheaper is Better: A Discount-Aware Network for Conversion Rate Prediction in E-commerce Recommendation System

Post-click conversion rate (CVR) is a crucial element in online recommendation systems, which addresses significant challenges such as data sparsity (DS), sample selection bias (SSB), and delayed feedback. However, the impact of item discount rate-a key factor influencing both pricing and user purchasing behavior, has received limited attention. In this paper, we introduce the Discount-Aware Network (DANet) to model the relationship between item discount rates and CVR. DANet comprises three main components: 1) a time-frequency transformation module that utilizes Fourier transform to derive the frequency spectrum and capture the long-term discount rate trends of items; 2) a distribution de-bias module designed to mitigate the biases in user-specific discount rates caused by various purchase combinations and promotional activities, as well as periodic deviations linked to different promotion periods on e-commerce platforms; and 3) a supervised regression auxiliary task that establishes the explicit item discount labels to enhance the model's performance in terms of value accuracy, facilitating an effective representation of item discount rates. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate the superiority of DANet, with offline AUC improving by 1.61%, and online A/B test also shows that DANet achieves impressive gains of 3.63% on pCVR and 2.23% on GMV. DANet has been successfully deployed on Alibaba Tmall APP. The code is available at https://github.com/tangrc/DANet.

From Head to Tail: Asymmetric Knowledge Transfer in Long-tail Recommendation with Generative Semantic IDs

Long-tail recommendation in real-world e-commerce platforms remains challenging due to severe data imbalance. Existing methods often struggle to combine content-based multimodal features with collaborative signals. Many of these methods also ignore an important asymmetry in knowledge transfer between head and tail IDs: noisy signals from tail IDs can hurt representation learning for head IDs. This paper presents AKT-Rec, a framework for Asymmetric Knowledge Transfer in long-tail Recommendation that uses LLM-generated semantic IDs. AKT-Rec uses Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with supervised fine-tuning to align content representations with collaborative information for both items and users, producing semantic representations. It then discretizes these representations into semantic IDs with a Residual-Quantized VAE (RQ-VAE), which yields semantic clusters of similar entities. AKT-Rec has two main components: (1) Cluster-Guided Adaptive Embedding, which decomposes each ID representation into a cluster-level embedding that captures shared semantics and an individual embedding. Through an asymmetric contrastive objective and an activity-aware gating mechanism, this module directs knowledge transfer from head to tail IDs. (2) Hierarchical Feature Aggregation, which builds parallel feature views and adaptively fuses them to optimize predictions for samples with varying activity levels. Extensive experiments on a large-scale industrial dataset and online A/B testing on the Alibaba Tmall platform demonstrate the effectiveness of AKT-Rec. AKT-Rec improves offline performance by 0.35% in AUC and 1.53% in GAUC, outperforming several competitive baselines. In online A/B testing, AKT-Rec achieves a 2.76% increase in CTR and a 3.47% increase in GMV, validating its utility in real-world production environments.