# A Pre-trained Sequential Recommendation Framework: Popularity Dynamics for Zero-shot Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

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- [Research on Cloud Platform Network Traffic Monitoring and Anomaly Detection System based on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17807/) (2025)
- [Multi-modal Relational Item Representation Learning for Inferring Substitutable and Complementary Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22268/) (2025)
- [LLM-EDT: Large Language Model Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation with Dual-phase Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19931/) (2025)
- [Universal Reusability in Recommender Systems: The Case for Dataset- and Task-Independent Frameworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03391/) (2025)
- [A Scenario-Oriented Survey of Federated Recommender Systems: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19620/) (2025)
- [Breaking the Information Silo: Semantic Personas for Cross-Domain Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01783/) (2026)
- [DUET -- Dual User Embedding Transformers for Offsite Conversion Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10243/) (2026)
- [RecPFN: Prior-Fitted Networks for In-Context-Based Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19735/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sequential recommenders are crucial to the success of online applications, eg e-commerce, video streaming, and social media. While model architectures continue to improve, for every new application domain, we still have to train a new model from scratch for high quality recommendations. On the other hand, pre-trained language and vision models have shown great success in zero-shot or few-shot adaptation to new application domains. Inspired by the success of pre-trained models in peer AI fields, we propose a novel pre-trained sequential recommendation framework: PrepRec. We learn universal item representations by modeling item popularity dynamics. Through extensive experiments on five real-world datasets, we show that PrepRec, without any auxiliary information, can not only zero-shot transfer to a new domain, but achieve competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art sequential recommender models with only a fraction of the model size. In addition, with a simple post-hoc interpolation, PrepRec can improve the performance of existing sequential recommenders on average by 13.8% in Recall@10 and 29.5% in NDCG@10. We provide an anonymized implementation of PrepRec at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PrepRec--2F60/