TiM4Rec: An Efficient Sequential Recommendation Model Based on Time-Aware Structured State Space Duality Model

Sequential recommendation represents a pivotal branch of recommendation systems, centered around dynamically analyzing the sequential dependencies between user preferences and their interactive behaviors. Despite the Transformer architecture-based models achieving commendable performance within this domain, their quadratic computational complexity relative to the sequence dimension impedes efficient modeling. In response, the innovative Mamba architecture, characterized by linear computational complexity, has emerged. Mamba4Rec further pioneers the application of Mamba in sequential recommendation. Nonetheless, Mamba 1's hardware-aware algorithm struggles to efficiently leverage modern matrix computational units, which lead to the proposal of the improved State Space Duality (SSD), also known as Mamba 2. While the SSD4Rec successfully adapts the SSD architecture for sequential recommendation, showing promising results in high-dimensional contexts, it suffers significant performance drops in low-dimensional scenarios crucial for pure ID sequential recommendation tasks. Addressing this challenge, we propose a novel sequential recommendation backbone model, TiM4Rec, which ameliorates the low-dimensional performance loss of the SSD architecture while preserving its computational efficiency. Drawing inspiration from TiSASRec, we develop a time-aware enhancement method tailored for the linear computation demands of the SSD architecture, thereby enhancing its adaptability and achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both low and high-dimensional modeling. The code for our model is publicly accessible at https://github.com/AlwaysFHao/TiM4Rec.