# Diffusion Cross-domain Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02182 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02182/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09761/) (2020)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01095/) (2022)
- [Analytic-DPM: an Analytic Estimate of the Optimal Reverse Variance in Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06503/) (2022)
- [Variational Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05814/) (2018)
- [Meta Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00837/) (2017)
- [MeLU: Meta-Learned User Preference Estimator for Cold-Start Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00413/) (2019)
- [CARD: Classification and Regression Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07275/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-Based Voice Conversion with Fast Maximum Likelihood Sampling Scheme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13821/) (2021)
- [Cross-Domain Recommendation: Challenges, Progress, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01696/) (2021)
- [Warm Up Cold-start Advertisements: Improving CTR Predictions via Learning to Learn ID Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11547/) (2019)
- [RecVAE: a New Variational Autoencoder for Top-N Recommendations with Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11160/) (2019)
- [CATN: Cross-Domain Recommendation for Cold-Start Users via Aspect Transfer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10549/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Cross-domain Recommendation: Taxonomies, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03357/) (2021)
- [Transfer-Meta Framework for Cross-domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04785/) (2021)
- [Cross-Domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users via Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16863/) (2022)
- [A Collective Variational Autoencoder for Top-N Recommendation with Side Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05730/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26063/) (2025)
- [Balancing User Preferences by Social Networks: A Condition-Guided Social Recommendation Model for Mitigating Popularity Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16772/) (2024)
- [Align-for-Fusion: Harmonizing Triple Preferences via Dual-oriented Diffusion for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05074/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It is always a challenge for recommender systems to give high-quality outcomes to cold-start users. One potential solution to alleviate the data sparsity problem for cold-start users in the target domain is to add data from the auxiliary domain. Finding a proper way to extract knowledge from an auxiliary domain and transfer it into a target domain is one of the main objectives for cross-domain recommendation (CDR) research. Among the existing methods, mapping approach is a popular one to implement cross-domain recommendation models (CDRs). For models of this type, a mapping module plays the role of transforming data from one domain to another. It primarily determines the performance of mapping approach CDRs. Recently, diffusion probability models (DPMs) have achieved impressive success for image synthesis related tasks. They involve recovering images from noise-added samples, which can be viewed as a data transformation process with outstanding performance. To further enhance the performance of CDRs, we first reveal the potential connection between DPMs and mapping modules of CDRs, and then propose a novel CDR model named Diffusion Cross-domain Recommendation (DiffCDR). More specifically, we first adopt the theory of DPM and design a Diffusion Module (DIM), which generates user's embedding in target domain. To reduce the negative impact of randomness introduced in DIM and improve the stability, we employ an Alignment Module to produce the aligned user embeddings. In addition, we consider the label data of the target domain and form the task-oriented loss function, which enables our DiffCDR to adapt to specific tasks. By conducting extensive experiments on datasets collected from reality, we demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of DiffCDR to outperform baseline models on various CDR tasks in both cold-start and warm-start scenarios.