Wavelet Enhanced Adaptive Frequency Filter for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation has garnered significant attention for its ability to capture dynamic preferences by mining users’ historical interaction data. Given that users’ complex and intertwined periodic preferences are difficult to disentangle in the time domain, recent research is exploring frequency domain analysis to identify these hidden patterns. However, current frequency-domain-based methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) They primarily employ static filters with fixed characteristics, overlooking the personalized nature of behavioral patterns; (ii) While the global discrete Fourier transform excels at modeling long-range dependencies, it can blur non-stationary signals and short-term fluctuations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel method called Wavelet Enhanced Adaptive Frequency Filter for Sequential Recommendation (WEARec). Specifically, it consists of two vital modules: dynamic frequency-domain filtering and wavelet feature enhancement. The former is used to dynamically adjust filtering operations based on behavioral sequences to extract personalized global information, and the latter integrates wavelet transform to reconstruct sequences, enhancing blurred non-stationary signals and short-term fluctuations. Finally, these two modules work synergistically to achieve comprehensive performance and efficiency optimization in long sequential recommendation scenarios. Extensive experiments on four widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of WEARec.