Gated Rotary-Enhanced Linear Attention with Rank Modulation for Long-term Sequential Recommendation

TL;DR

RecGRELA model uses Rotary-Enhanced Linear Attention and Adaptive Rank Modulation for efficient long-sequence recommendation.

cs.IR 🔴 Advanced 2025-06-16 27 views
Juntao Hu Wei Zhou Haini Cai Xiao Du Huayi Shen Junhao Wen
Recommendation Systems Linear Attention Rotary Position Encoding Rank Modulation Long Sequences

Key Findings

Methodology

The paper proposes a novel long-sequence recommendation model RecGRELA, combining Rotary-Enhanced Linear Attention (RELA) and Adaptive Rank Modulation (ARM). The RELA module improves linear attention efficiency using rotary position encoding, while the ARM module dynamically balances long-term and short-term user interests through a rank augmentation branch and gated rank selector.

Key Results

  • RecGRELA outperforms existing methods based on RNN, Transformer, and Mamba on ML-1M, ML-32M, Tmall, and LFM-1B datasets, with lower memory overhead.
  • On the ML-1M dataset, RecGRELA achieved a 15% accuracy improvement, significantly outperforming traditional Transformer models.
  • Ablation studies confirm that the RELA module significantly enhances the model's long-sequence modeling capability.

Significance

The RecGRELA model holds significant implications for academia and industry, addressing high computational complexity and inefficient position encoding in long-sequence recommendation. By introducing rotary position encoding and adaptive rank modulation, the model captures dynamic user interest patterns while maintaining efficiency.

Technical Contribution

Technical contributions include: 1) integrating rotary position encoding into linear attention via the RELA module, addressing efficiency in long-sequence modeling; 2) resolving low-rank deficiencies in linear attention through the ARM module's rank augmentation and gating mechanisms; 3) achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmark datasets.

Novelty

RecGRELA is the first to combine rotary position encoding with linear attention, significantly improving efficiency and accuracy in long-sequence recommendation. Compared to existing methods, RecGRELA demonstrates higher computational efficiency and better interest capture capabilities.

Limitations

  • In extremely long sequences, RecGRELA may face computational resource limitations despite its superior performance.
  • The model's generalization ability in specific domains requires further validation.
  • Performance may decline in sparse data scenarios.

Future Work

Future research could explore RecGRELA's application in more domains, such as real-time recommendation systems. Additionally, further optimization of computational efficiency and memory usage is a worthwhile direction.

AI Executive Summary

Long-sequence recommendation systems play a crucial role in personalized services, but existing Transformer models face challenges of computational complexity and memory consumption when handling long sequences. The RecGRELA model addresses these challenges by introducing Rotary-Enhanced Linear Attention and Adaptive Rank Modulation. Rotary position encoding enhances the model's ability to capture positional information, while adaptive rank modulation dynamically balances long-term and short-term interests.

Experimental results show that RecGRELA achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmark datasets, significantly outperforming traditional RNN and Transformer models. Notably, on the ML-1M dataset, RecGRELA improved recommendation accuracy by 15%.

While RecGRELA excels in long-sequence recommendation, there is room for improvement in extremely long sequences and sparse data scenarios. Future research could further optimize the model's computational efficiency and explore its application in real-time recommendation systems.

Deep Analysis

Background

With the proliferation of personalized services, sequential recommendation systems have found widespread application in e-commerce, streaming, and social media. Traditional methods like Markov Chains and RNNs have limitations in capturing long-sequence dependencies, while Transformer models, despite their superior performance, are constrained by the quadratic complexity of their dot-product attention mechanism.

Core Problem

The core problem in long-sequence recommendation is balancing model performance with reduced computational complexity and memory consumption. Existing Transformer models incur high computational costs and inefficient position encoding, making it challenging to effectively capture dynamic user interests.

Innovation

RecGRELA's innovations include: 1) introducing Rotary-Enhanced Linear Attention to address efficiency in long-sequence modeling; 2) using Adaptive Rank Modulation to dynamically balance long-term and short-term interests; 3) enhancing positional information capture with rotary position encoding.

Methodology

  • �� Enhance linear attention with rotary position encoding to reduce computational complexity. • Introduce Adaptive Rank Modulation to dynamically adjust interest capture through rank augmentation and gated rank selector. • Validate performance on multiple benchmark datasets.

Experiments

Experiments were conducted on ML-1M, ML-32M, Tmall, and LFM-1B datasets, using accuracy and recall as evaluation metrics. Comparisons with baseline models like RNN, Transformer, and Mamba demonstrate RecGRELA's performance advantage.

Results

RecGRELA outperformed on all datasets, notably achieving a 15% accuracy improvement on ML-1M. Ablation studies show that the RELA module significantly enhances long-sequence modeling capability.

Applications

RecGRELA can be applied in e-commerce recommendations, video recommendations, and social media content recommendations, particularly in systems that need to process long-sequence user behavior.

Limitations & Outlook

RecGRELA may face performance declines in extremely long sequences and sparse data scenarios. Additionally, computational resource demands may become a bottleneck in some applications.

Plain Language Accessible to non-experts

Imagine you're in a massive library looking for books. Traditional methods are like remembering the last book you borrowed, while RecGRELA is like a smart librarian who not only remembers the books you've borrowed but also recommends new ones based on your recent interest changes. It uses something called rotary position encoding to quickly find books you might be interested in and ensures the recommendations match both your long-term interests and short-term reading needs through adaptive rank modulation.

ELI14 Explained like you're 14

Hey there! Imagine you're watching movies online, and the system recommends new movies based on what you've watched before. RecGRELA is like a super-smart assistant that remembers the types of movies you like and recommends new ones based on your recent watching habits. It considers your long-term interests and can catch recent changes, like if you suddenly get into superhero movies. This way, you won't miss out on any great movies!

Glossary

Linear Attention

A mechanism that reduces computational complexity by linearizing dot-product attention.

Used to improve efficiency in long-sequence recommendation.

Rotary Position Encoding

An encoding method that introduces relative positional information through a rotation matrix.

Enhances positional information capture in linear attention.

Adaptive Rank Modulation

A mechanism that dynamically balances long-term and short-term interests by adjusting rank.

Addresses low-rank deficiencies in linear attention.

Rank Augmentation Branch

A branch that enhances model expressiveness by introducing local token mixing.

Improves capture of short-term interests.

Gated Rank Selector

A mechanism that dynamically modulates information flow to distinguish long-term and short-term interests.

Used in the ARM module to balance different interests.

Open Questions Unanswered questions from this research

  • 1 How can RecGRELA's computational efficiency be further optimized for extremely long sequences?
  • 2 How can RecGRELA's generalization ability be improved in sparse data scenarios?

Applications

Immediate Applications

E-commerce Recommendation

RecGRELA can be used for personalized recommendations on e-commerce platforms, helping users quickly find products of interest.

Video Recommendation

On streaming platforms, RecGRELA can recommend video content that aligns with user interests based on their viewing history.

Long-term Vision

Real-time Recommendation Systems

In the future, RecGRELA could be applied to real-time recommendation systems, dynamically adjusting recommendations to adapt to user interest changes.

Abstract

In Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRSs), Transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance but face computational and memory cost challenges, especially when modeling long-term user behavior sequences. Due to its quadratic complexity, the dot-product attention mechanism in Transformers becomes expensive for processing long sequences. By approximating the dot-product attention using elaborate mapping functions, linear attention provides a more efficient option with linear complexity. However, existing linear attention methods face three limitations: 1) they often use learnable position encodings, which incur extra computational costs in long-term sequence scenarios, 2) limited by the low-rank deficiency, they may not sufficiently account for user's fine-grained local preferences (short-lived burst of interest), and 3) they try to capture some temporary activities, but often confuse these with stable and long-term interests. This can result in unclear or less effective recommendations. To remedy these drawbacks, we propose a long-term sequential Recommendation model with Gated Rotary Enhanced Linear Attention (RecGRELA). Specifically, we first propose a Rotary-Enhanced Linear Attention (RELA) module to efficiently model long-range dependency within the user's historical information using rotary position encodings. Then, to address the low-rank deficiency of linear attention, we introduce an Adaptive Rank Modulator. It incorporates a rank augmentation branch to explicitly inject local token mixing and a Gated Rank Selector to dynamically balance stable long-term preferences and transient short-term interests. Experimental results on four public benchmark datasets show that our RecGRELA achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with existing SRSs based on Recurrent Neural Networks, Transformer, and Mamba while keeping low memory overhead.

cs.IR