Behavior-aware Attribute-infused Sequential Encoders for Next-Item Recommendation

While previous works on multi-behavior sequential recommendation (MBSR) have made great efforts to exploit the behavior types, they often fail to fully leverage the behavior and attribute information to learn different aspects of user preferences. Firstly, for predicting user preferences under target behaviors, there is considerable room for improvement by capturing both intra- and inter-behavior item transition relationships at the sequence level, as well as extracting the inter-behavior common and different aspects of a user's preferences at each time step based on the contextual sequential information. Secondly, in MBSR, the effect of behavior types on item attributes has not been revealed, which is very important in real-world applications since a behavior such as view representing a user's weak preferences could not explicitly indicate the user's interests on an attribute. To address the above two issues, we propose a novel solution called b ehavior-aware a ttribute-infused s equential e ncoders (BASE). Specifically, a module named tri-path preference learning is designed to capture user multi-aspect interests via a sequence encoder, a behavior encoder and an attribute encoder. Besides, a behavior-aware dual-granularity contrastive learning module constructs sample pairs in item and attribute granularities to enhance the model's ability to utilize potential item and attribute information. Extensive empirical studies on three public datasets show that our BASE significantly outperforms various state-of-the-art methods from five different categories. The datasets and our implementation codes are released at https://github.com/Erin-Gr/BASE .