Oracle-guided Dynamic User Preference Modeling for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation methods can capture dynamic user preferences from user historical interactions to achieve better performance. However, most existing methods only use past information extracted from user historical interactions to train the models, leading to the deviations of user preference modeling. Besides past information, future information is also available during training, which contains the ``oracle'' user preferences in the future and will be beneficial to model dynamic user preferences. Therefore, we propose an oracle-guided dynamic user preference modeling method for sequential recommendation (Oracle4Rec), which leverages future information to guide model training on past information, aiming to learn ``forward-looking'' models. Specifically, Oracle4Rec first extracts past and future information through two separate encoders, then learns a forward-looking model through an oracle-guiding module which minimizes the discrepancy between past and future information. We also tailor a two-phase model training strategy to make the guiding more effective. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Oracle4Rec is superior to state-of-the-art sequential methods. Further experiments show that Oracle4Rec can be leveraged as a generic module in other sequential recommendation methods to improve their performance with a considerable margin.