Generative Data Transformation: From Mixed to Unified Data

TL;DR

Taesar is a data-centric framework that uses contrastive decoding to enhance target sequences with cross-domain context, improving recommendation models without complex architectures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel data-centric approach employing contrastive decoding for cross-domain sequence adaptation, outperforming model-centric methods.

Findings

Taesar outperforms existing solutions in recommendation tasks.

It generalizes well across various sequential models.

Enriches datasets effectively by combining data- and model-centric paradigms.

Abstract

Recommendation model performance is intrinsically tied to the quality, volume, and relevance of their training data. To address common challenges like data sparsity and cold start, recent researchs have leveraged data from multiple auxiliary domains to enrich information within the target domain. However, inherent domain gaps can degrade the quality of mixed-domain data, leading to negative transfer and diminished model performance. Existing prevailing \emph{model-centric} paradigm -- which relies on complex, customized architectures -- struggles to capture the subtle, non-structural sequence dependencies across domains, leading to poor generalization and high demands on computational resources. To address these shortcomings, we propose \textsc{Taesar}, a \emph{data-centric} framework for \textbf{t}arget-\textbf{a}lign\textbf{e}d \textbf{s}equenti\textbf{a}l \textbf{r}egeneration, which employs a contrastive decoding mechanism to adaptively encode cross-domain context into target-domain sequences. It employs contrastive decoding to encode cross-domain context into target sequences, enabling standard models to learn intricate dependencies without complex fusion architectures. Experiments show \textsc{Taesar} outperforms model-centric solutions and generalizes to various sequential models. By generating enriched datasets, \textsc{Taesar} effectively combines the strengths of data- and model-centric paradigms. The code accompanying this paper is available at~ \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/Taesar}.