Advancing Session-Based Recommendations with Atten-Mixer+: Dynamic and Adaptive Multi-Level Intent Mining

Session-Based Recommendation (SBR) systems, traditionally reliant on complex Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), often face challenges with marginal performance improvements despite increased model complexity. In this article, we dissect the classical GNN-based SBR models and empirically find that the sophisticated GNN propagations might be redundant, given the readout module plays a significant role in GNN-based models. Based on this observation, we introduce Atten-Mixer+, an advanced iteration of our previously developed Multi-Level Attention Mixture Network (Atten-Mixer). Atten-Mixer+ forgoes GNN propagation in favor of a dynamic and adaptive readout process, tailored to the unique characteristics of each session. Different from the vanilla version, Atten-Mixer+ features the Adaptive Intent Scaler (AIS) layer, which dynamically determines the depth of multi-level user intent analysis and a soft allocation approach for generating user intent queries across entire user interaction sequences. This innovative design allows Atten-Mixer+ to capture a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of user behaviors, overcoming the limitations of fixed-length analysis. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets highlight Atten-Mixer+’s superior efficiency and effectiveness, marking a significant step forward in the predictive accuracy of SBR systems.