# Enhancing User Sequence Modeling through Barlow Twins-based Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00953 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00953/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Learning Representations for Automatic Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06668/) (2016)
- [Multi-task Self-Supervised Visual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07860/) (2017)
- [COCO-LM: Correcting and Contrasting Text Sequences for Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08473/) (2021)
- [Efficient Self-supervised Learning with Contextualized Target Representations for Vision, Speech and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07525/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Learning for Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15876/) (2022)
- [Intent Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02519/) (2022)
- [Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08027/) (2021)
- [LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08191/) (2023)
- [Debiased Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11780/) (2023)
- [Audio Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Audio Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14345/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

User sequence modeling is crucial for modern large-scale recommendation systems, as it enables the extraction of informative representations of users and items from their historical interactions. These user representations are widely used for a variety of downstream tasks to enhance users' online experience. A key challenge for learning these representations is the lack of labeled training data. While self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have emerged as a promising solution for learning representations from unlabeled data, many existing approaches rely on extensive negative sampling, which can be computationally expensive and may not always be feasible in real-world scenario. In this work, we propose an adaptation of Barlow Twins, a state-of-the-art SSL methods, to user sequence modeling by incorporating suitable augmentation methods. Our approach aims to mitigate the need for large negative sample batches, enabling effective representation learning with smaller batch sizes and limited labeled data. We evaluate our method on the MovieLens-1M, MovieLens-20M, and Yelp datasets, demonstrating that our method consistently outperforms the widely-used dual encoder model across three downstream tasks, achieving an 8%-20% improvement in accuracy. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of our approach in extracting valuable sequence-level information for user modeling, particularly in scenarios where labeled data is scarce and negative examples are limited.