# CITIES: Contextual Inference of Tail-Item Embeddings for Sequential Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10868 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10868/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [LLM-ESR: Large Language Models Enhancement for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20646/) (2024)
- [MELT: Mutual Enhancement of Long-Tailed User and Item for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08382/) (2023)
- [NR4DER: Neural Re-ranking for Diversified Exercise Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06341/) (2025)
- [Listwise Preference Alignment Optimization for Tail Item Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02255/) (2025)
- [Generative Archetype-Grounded Item Representations for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11023/) (2026)
- [The Best of the Two Worlds: Harmonizing Semantic and Hash IDs for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.10388/) (2025)
- [Taming the Long Tail: Efficient Item-wise Sharpness-Aware Minimization for LLM-based Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12752/) (2026)
- [Fusion and Alignment Enhancement with Large Language Models for Tail-item Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03688/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sequential recommendation techniques provide users with product recommendations fitting their current preferences by handling dynamic user preferences over time. Previous studies have focused on modeling sequential dynamics without much regard to which of the best-selling products (i.e., head items) or niche products (i.e., tail items) should be recommended. We scrutinize the structural reason for why tail items are barely served in the current sequential recommendation model, which consists of an item-embedding layer, a sequence-modeling layer, and a recommendation layer. Well-designed sequence-modeling and recommendation layers are expected to naturally learn suitable item embeddings. However, tail items are likely to fall short of this expectation because the current model structure is not suitable for learning high-quality embeddings with insufficient data. Thus, tail items are rarely recommended. To eliminate this issue, we propose a framework called CITIES, which aims to enhance the quality of the tail-item embeddings by training an embedding-inference function using multiple contextual head items so that the recommendation performance improves for not only the tail items but also for the head items. Moreover, our framework can infer new-item embeddings without an additional learning process. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that applying CITIES to the state-of-the-art methods improves recommendation performance for both tail and head items. We conduct an additional experiment to verify that CITIES can infer suitable new-item embeddings as well.