Disentangled Dynamic Graph Attention Network for Out-of-distribution Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

Sequential recommendation, leveraging user-item interaction histories to provide personalized and timely suggestions, has drawn significant research interest recently. With the power of exploiting spatio-temporal dynamics, dynamic graph neural networks (DyGNNs) show great potential in sequential recommendation by modeling the dynamic relationship between users and items. However, spatio-temporal distribution shifts naturally exist in out-of-distribution sequential recommendation, where both user-item relationships and temporal sequences demonstrate pattern shifts. The out-of-distribution scenarios may lead to the failure of existing DyGNNs in handling spatio-temporal distribution shifts in sequential recommendation, given that the patterns they exploit tend to be variant w.r.t labels under distribution shifts. In this paper, we propose D isentangled I ntervention-based D ynamic graph A ttention networks with I nvariance Promotion ( I-DIDA ) to handle spatio-temporal distribution shifts in sequential recommendation by discovering and utilizing invariant patterns, ie , structures and features whose predictive abilities are stable across distribution shifts. Specifically, we first propose a disentangled spatio-temporal attention network to capture the variant and invariant patterns. By utilizing the disentangled patterns, we design a spatio-temporal intervention mechanism to create multiple interventional distributions and an environment inference module to infer the latent spatio-temporal environments, and minimize the invariance loss to leverage the invariant patterns with stable predictive abilities under distribution shifts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art sequential recommendation baselines under distribution shifts.