NP-MiSR: Neural Process-based Multi-Interest Learning for Session-Based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to provide users with satisfactory suggestions via modeling preferences based on short-term, anonymous user-item interaction sequences. Traditional single interest learning methods struggle to align with the diverse nature of preferences. Recent advances resolved this bottleneck by learning multiple interest embeddings for each session. However, due to the pre-defining scheme of interest quantity (e.g. the number of interests), these approaches are deficient in adaptive ability towards distinctive preference patterns across different users. Moreover, these methods rely solely on the current session and ignore useful information from related ones. The short-term property of sessions would magnify the insufficient representation issue. To address these limitations, we propose a Neural Process-based Multi-interest learning framework for Session-based Recommendation, namely NP-MiSR. To be specific, our method enables adaptive multi-interest representation learning through two complementary mechanisms: 1) Neural Process-based Intra-session interest modeling: We employ Neural Processes to model the distribution of interests within a session, where the fixed interest configurations are no longer needed. 2) Cross-session context fusion: We extract interest distributions of similar sessions as contextual priors to refine the current session’s interest representation. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art SBR approaches with an average improvement of 38.8%. Moreover, the few-shot learning task reveals that NP-MiSR achieves a surprisingly favorable efficiency v.s. performance trade-off where utilizing only 10% of the training data attains 95% of the recommendation performance.