Iterative Sparse Attention for Long-sequence Recommendation

Longer historical behaviors often improve recommendation accuracy but bring efficient problems. As sequences get longer, the following two main challenges have not been addressed:

(1) efficient modeling under increasing sequence length and (2) interest drifting within historical items. In this paper, we propose Iterative Sparse Attention for Long-sequence Recommendation (ISA) with Sparse Attention Layer and Iterative Attention Layer to efficiently capture sequential pattern and expand the receptive field of each historical items. We take the pioneering step to address the efficient and interest drifting challenges for the long-sequence recommendation simultaneously. The theoretical analysis illustrates that our proposed iterative method can approximate full attention efficiently. Experiments on two real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed method against state-of-the-art baselines.