Context-Aware Disentanglement for Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation: A Causal View

TL;DR

This paper introduces CoDiS, a causal, context-aware framework for cross-domain sequential recommendation that disentangles shared and domain-specific preferences, improving recommendation accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel causal view-based disentanglement method addressing context variation, gradient conflicts, and user overlap limitations in CDSR.

Findings

CoDiS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three real-world datasets.

The variational context adjustment reduces confounding effects.

Expert strategies effectively resolve gradient conflicts.

Abstract

Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) aims to en-hance recommendation quality by transferring knowledge across domains, offering effective solutions to data sparsity and cold-start issues. However, existing methods face three major limitations: (1) they overlook varying contexts in user interaction sequences, resulting in spurious correlations that obscure the true causal relationships driving user preferences; (2) the learning of domain- shared and domain-specific preferences is hindered by gradient conflicts between domains, leading to a seesaw effect where performance in one domain improves at the expense of the other; (3) most methods rely on the unrealistic assumption of substantial user overlap across domains. To address these issues, we propose CoDiS, a context-aware disentanglement framework grounded in a causal view to accurately disentangle domain-shared and domain-specific preferences. Specifically, Our approach includes a variational context adjustment method to reduce confounding effects of contexts, expert isolation and selection strategies to resolve gradient conflict, and a variational adversarial disentangling module for the thorough disentanglement of domain-shared and domain-specific representations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CoDiS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CDSR baselines with statistical significance. Code is available at:https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CoDiS-6FA0.