De-collapsing User Intent: Adaptive Diffusion Augmentation with Mixture-of-Experts for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to predict users’ next action based on their historical behavior, and is widely adopted by a number of platforms. The performance of SR models relies on rich interaction data. However, in real-world scenarios, many users only have a few historical interactions, leading to the problem of data sparsity. Data sparsity not only leads to model overfitting on sparse sequences, but also hinders the model’s ability to capture the underlying hierarchy of user intents. This results in misinterpreting the user’s true intents and recommending irrelevant items. Existing data augmentation methods attempt to mitigate overfitting by generating relevant and varied data. However, they overlook the problem of reconstructing the user’s intent hierarchy, which is lost in sparse data. Consequently, the augmented data often fails to align with the user’s true intents, potentially leading to misguided recommendations. To address this, we propose the Adaptive Diffusion Augmentation for Recommendation (ADARec) framework. Critically, instead of using a diffusion model as a black-box generator, we use its entire step-wise denoising trajectory to reconstruct a user’s intent hierarchy from a single sparse sequence. To ensure both efficiency and effectiveness, our framework adap-tively determines the required augmentation depth for each sequence and employs a specialized mixture-of-experts architecture to decouple coarse-and fine-grained intents. Experiments show ADARec outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks and on sparse sequences, demonstrating its ability to reconstruct hierarchical intent representations from sparse data.