# Positional encoding is not the same as context: A study on positional encoding for sequential recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10436 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10436/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06939/) (2015)
- [DeepFM: A Factorization-Machine based Neural Network for CTR Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04247/) (2017)
- [Personalized Top-N Sequential Recommendation via Convolutional Sequence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07426/) (2018)
- [S^3-Rec: Self-Supervised Learning for Sequential Recommendation with Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07873/) (2020)
- [Neural Attentive Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04725/) (2017)
- [Fusing Similarity Models with Markov Chains for Sparse Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09152/) (2016)
- [VBPR: Visual Bayesian Personalized Ranking from Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.01784/) (2015)
- [A Simple Convolutional Generative Network for Next Item Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05163/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Session-based Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.04864/) (2019)
- [Torch.manual_seed(3407) is all you need: On the influence of random seeds in deep learning architectures for computer vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08203/) (2021)
- [Translation-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02410/) (2017)
- [A Simple and Effective Positional Encoding for Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08698/) (2021)
- [Length Extrapolation of Transformers: A Survey from the Perspective of Positional Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17044/) (2023)
- [CARCA: Context and Attribute-Aware Next-Item Recommendation via Cross-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06519/) (2022)
- [Vista: A Visually, Socially, and Temporally-aware Model for Artistic Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04373/) (2016)
- [Explainable Fashion Recommendation: A Semantic Attribute Region Guided Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12862/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Survey on Large Language Models in Multimodal Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09777/) (2025)
- [eSASRec: Enhancing Transformer-based Recommendations in a Modular Fashion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06450/) (2025)
- [Inductive Transfer Learning for Graph-Based Recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22799/) (2025)
- [Position-Aware Sequential Attention for Accurate Next Item Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21052/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The rapid growth of streaming media and e-commerce has driven advancements in recommendation systems, particularly Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRS). These systems employ users' interaction histories to predict future preferences. While recent research has focused on architectural innovations like transformer blocks and feature extraction, positional encodings, crucial for capturing temporal patterns, have received less attention. These encodings are often conflated with contextual, such as the temporal footprint, which previous works tend to treat as interchangeable with positional information. This paper highlights the critical distinction between temporal footprint and positional encodings, demonstrating that the latter offers unique relational cues between items, which the temporal footprint alone cannot provide. Through extensive experimentation on eight Amazon datasets and subsets, we assess the impact of various encodings on performance metrics and training stability. We introduce new positional encodings and investigate integration strategies that improve both metrics and stability, surpassing state-of-the-art results at the time of this work's initial preprint. Importantly, we demonstrate that selecting the appropriate encoding is not only key to better performance but also essential for building robust, reliable SRS models.