Divergence Meets Consensus: A Multi-Source Negative Sampling Framework for Sequential Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces MDCNS, a multi-source negative sampling framework for sequential recommendation that enhances diversity, reduces local optima, and improves generalization by leveraging external models and divergence-based re-ranking.

Contribution

MDCNS is a novel negative sampling method that combines multi-source scoring, divergence re-ranking, and consensus distillation to address limitations of existing approaches.

Findings

MDCNS outperforms state-of-the-art methods on six datasets.

It improves recommendation accuracy and diversity.

The framework generalizes across multiple backbone models.

Abstract

Negative sampling is significant for training sequential recommendation models under implicit feedback. The predominant strategy, self-guided hard negative sampling, selects negatives based on the model's current state but suffers from three limitations: (1) the coupling between sampling and model updates triggers a vicious cycle that drives the model into local optima; (2) relying on current model parameters narrows sampling to a small region of the item space, reducing diversity and harming generalization; (3) identifying a hard negative requires scoring the entire candidate pool, causing substantial computational overhead with minimal information gain. To address these challenges, we propose MDCNS (Multi-source Divergence-Consensus for Negative Sampling), a novel "Teacher-Peer-Self" framework inspired by Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory. The proposed method comprises three components, including multi-source scoring, divergence re-ranking, and consensus distillation. Firstly, multi-source scoring incorporates peer and ensemble teacher models to inject external negative signals and break the self-reinforcement loop. Then, divergence re-ranking exploits prediction discrepancy between self and peer models to enhance sampling diversity. Finally, consensus distillation aligns the self model with the teacher via KL divergence, simultaneously improving computational cost utilization. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets and five backbone models show that MDCNS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art negative sampling methods, demonstrating strong effectiveness and generalization.