BLADE: A Behavior-Level Data Augmentation Framework with Dual Fusion Modeling for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation

TL;DR

BLADE is a novel framework for multi-behavior sequential recommendation that employs dual fusion modeling and behavior-level data augmentation to better capture user interests and address data sparsity.

Contribution

It introduces a dual item-behavior fusion architecture and three behavior-level data augmentation methods to improve multi-behavior recommendation performance.

Findings

Enhanced recommendation accuracy on real-world datasets

Effective handling of behavior heterogeneity

Mitigation of data sparsity issues

Abstract

Multi-behavior sequential recommendation aims to capture users' dynamic interests by modeling diverse types of user interactions over time. Although several studies have explored this setting, the recommendation performance remains suboptimal, mainly due to two fundamental challenges: the heterogeneity of user behaviors and data sparsity. To address these challenges, we propose BLADE, a framework that enhances multi-behavior modeling while mitigating data sparsity. Specifically, to handle behavior heterogeneity, we introduce a dual item-behavior fusion architecture that incorporates behavior information at both the input and intermediate levels, enabling preference modeling from multiple perspectives. To mitigate data sparsity, we design three behavior-level data augmentation methods that operate directly on behavior sequences rather than core item sequences. These methods generate diverse augmented views while preserving the semantic consistency of item sequences. These augmented views further enhance representation learning and generalization via contrastive learning. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.