CFSeRec: A Contrastive Framework for Sequential Recommendation

In sequential recommender systems, the main problems are the long-tailed distribution of data and noise interference. A Contrastive Framework for Sequential Recommendation (CFSeRec) is proposed to solve these two problems respectively. Token shuffling and adversarial attack data augmentation methods are used in the framework to improve the quality and quantity of training data, so that the long-tailed problem is mitigated. Through the application of projection head method, the sequence representation becomes more general and robust, rather than just adapted to the task of contrastive learning. Therefore, the impact of noise on sequence recommender systems is effectively alleviated. Experiments on four public datasets show that CFSeRec achieves state-of-the-art performance in the metrics of hit ratio and normalized discounted cumulative gain, when comparing to the seven previous frameworks.