用扩散模型统一冷热物品推荐,解决性能此消彼长难题。
DiffCold: A Diffusion-based Generative Model for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

- 基于扩散模型生成冷启动物品嵌入,保留暖物品原始分布结构。
- 在三个数据集上超越现有方法,冷热物品表现均提升,无性能此消彼长。
- 适合需要兼顾新旧物品推荐的电商、内容平台场景。
冷启动物品推荐在真实系统中仍面临挑战,因缺乏交互历史。现有方法虽利用物品内容特征缓解此问题,但普遍存在“跷跷板困境”:提升冷物品性能会损害暖物品表现,反之亦然。我们发现根源在于分布差异:暖物品嵌入位于由丰富交互信号塑造的复杂“行为流形”,而冷物品嵌入仅受限于内容衍生的“语义流形”。现有方法强行映射不一致空间,导致模型牺牲暖物品精度以适应冷物品。为此,我们提出 DiffCold,一种基于扩散的生成模型,统一暖与冷物品表示。不同于 GAN 或 VAE,DiffCold 利用条件扩散从内容重建暖物品嵌入,保留底层流形结构而不退化。进一步设计了两个模块:检索增强聚合器,通过语义相似暖物品初始化生成,避免低效噪声;模拟对齐模块,通过对比学习强制生成与真实嵌入分布一致。在三个基准数据集上的实验表明,DiffCold 有效解决跷跷板困境,在所有指标上持续优于现有最先进方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Cold-start item recommendation remains a persistent challenge in real-world systems due to the absence of interaction histories. While prior models attempt to bridge this gap using item content features, they universally suffer from the \textbf{seesaw dilemma}: enhancing performance for cold items inevitably degrades performance for warm items, and vice versa. We identify that this dilemma stems from a fundamental \textbf{distributional disparity}: warm item embeddings occupy a complex ``behavioral manifold" shaped by rich interaction signals, whereas cold item embeddings are constrained to a ``semantic manifold" derived solely from auxiliary content. Existing methods often force a rigid mapping between these inconsistent spaces, causing the model to sacrifice the precision of warm representations to accommodate cold ones. To address this, we propose \textbf{DiffCold}, a diffusion-based generative model that unifies warm and cold representations. Unlike GANs or VAEs, DiffCold leverages conditional diffusion to reconstruct warm item embeddings from content, preserving the underlying manifold structure without degradation. We further tailor this paradigm with two specific designs: a \textbf{Retrieval-enhanced Aggregator} that initializes generation using semantically similar warm items to bypass inefficient noise, and a \textbf{Simulation-based Representation Alignment} module that enforces distribution consistency between generated and real embeddings via contrastive learning. Experiments on three benchmarks confirm that DiffCold resolves the seesaw dilemma, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods across all metrics.
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