# Modeling User Preferences as Distributions for Optimal Transport-Based Cross-Domain Recommendation under Non-Overlapping Settings

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16210 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16210/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [RecBole: Towards a Unified, Comprehensive and Efficient Framework for Recommendation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01731/) (2020)
- [DDTCDR: Deep Dual Transfer Cross Domain Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.05189/) (2019)
- [RecBole 2.0: Towards a More Up-to-Date Recommendation Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07351/) (2022)
- [DA-GCN: A Domain-aware Attentive Graph Convolution Network for Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03300/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Cross-domain Recommendation: Taxonomies, Methods, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03357/) (2021)
- [A Deep Framework for Cross-Domain and Cross-System Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06215/) (2020)
- [Transfer-Meta Framework for Cross-domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04785/) (2021)
- [DaisyRec 2.0: Benchmarking Recommendation for Rigorous Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10848/) (2022)
- [RecGURU: Adversarial Learning of Generalized User Representations for Cross-Domain Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10093/) (2021)
- [RecSys-DAN: Discriminative Adversarial Networks for Cross-Domain Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10794/) (2019)
- [Semi-supervised Collaborative Filtering by Text-enhanced Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07085/) (2020)
- [CnGAN: Generative Adversarial Networks for Cross-network user preference generation for non-overlapped users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10845/) (2020)
- [DADIN: Domain Adversarial Deep Interest Network for Cross Domain Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12058/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-domain recommender (CDR) systems aim to transfer knowledge from data-rich domains to data-sparse ones, alleviating sparsity and cold-start issues present in conventional single-domain recommenders. However, many CDR approaches rely on overlapping users or items to establish explicit cross-domain connections, which is unrealistic in practice. Moreover, most methods represent user preferences as fixed discrete vectors, limiting their ability to capture the fine-grained and multi-aspect nature of user interests. To address these limitations, we propose DUP-OT (Distributional User Preferences with Optimal Transport), a novel framework for non-overlapping CDR. DUP-OT consists of three stages: (1) a shared preprocessing module that extracts review-based embeddings using a unified sentence encoder and autoencoder; (2) a user preference modeling module that represents each user's interests as a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) over item embeddings; and (3) an optimal-transport-based alignment module that matches Gaussian components across domains, enabling effective preference transfer for target-domain rating prediction. Experiments on Amazon Review datasets show that DUP-OT outperforms single-domain baselines even without source-domain data, and achieves lower RMSE than the cross-domain baseline TDAR under strictly non-overlapping training settings, demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing large prediction errors for cold-start users. The implementation is available at https://github.com/XiaoZY2000/dup-ot.