C$^2$-Rec: An Effective Consistency Constraint for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation methods play an important role in real-world recommender systems. These systems are able to catch user preferences by taking advantage of historical records and then performing recommendations. Contrastive learning(CL) is a cutting-edge technology that can assist us in obtaining informative user representations, but these CL-based models need subtle negative sampling strategies, tedious data augmentation methods, and heavy hyper-parameters tuning work. In this paper, we introduce another way to generate better user representations and recommend more attractive items to users. Particularly, we put forward an effective \textbf{C}onsistency \textbf{C}onstraint for sequential \textbf{Rec}ommendation(C$^2$-Rec) in which only two extra training objectives are used without any structural modifications and data augmentation strategies. Substantial experiments have been conducted on three benchmark datasets and one real industrial dataset, which proves that our proposed method outperforms SOTA models substantially. Furthermore, our method needs much less training time than those CL-based models. Online AB-test on real-world recommendation systems also achieves 10.141\% improvement on the click-through rate and 10.541\% increase on the average click number per capita. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhengrongqin/C2-Rec}.