# FlowRec: Prior-Informed Flow Matching for Efficient Sequential Recommendation Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17618 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17618/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion recommenders, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 30 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Aug 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-recommenders/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [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)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Improving and generalizing flow-based generative models with minibatch optimal transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00482/) (2023)
- [Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04757/) (2015)
- [Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06939/) (2015)
- [Personalized Top-N Sequential Recommendation via Convolutional Sequence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07426/) (2018)
- [Variational Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05814/) (2018)
- [Fusing Similarity Models with Markov Chains for Sparse Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09152/) (2016)
- [Matcha-TTS: A fast TTS architecture with conditional flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03199/) (2023)
- [DiffuRec: A Diffusion Model for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00686/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Recommender Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04971/) (2023)
- [Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20453/) (2023)
- [LLM-ESR: Large Language Models Enhancement for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20646/) (2024)
- [Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10693/) (2021)
- [Sequential Recommendation with Self-Attentive Multi-Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10602/) (2020)
- [DimeRec: A Unified Framework for Enhanced Sequential Recommendation via Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12153/) (2024)
- [LayoutFlow: Flow Matching for Layout Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18187/) (2024)
- [Preference Alignment with Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19806/) (2024)
- [Breaking Determinism: Fuzzy Modeling of Sequential Recommendation Using Discrete State Space Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23994/) (2024)
- [Preference Diffusion for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13117/) (2024)
- [Flow Matching for Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07303/) (2025)
- [Bridging User Dynamics: Transforming Sequential Recommendations with Schr"odinger Bridge and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10522/) (2024)
- [Flow Matching based Sequential Recommender Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16298/) (2025)

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

- [Gaussian Mixture Flow Matching with Domain Alignment for Multi-Domain Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21021/) (2025)
- [FAVE: Flow-based Average Velocity Establishment for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04427/) (2026)
- [Escaping the Euclidean Void: Manifold-Informed Flow Matching for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23762/) (2026)
- [Preference Flow Matching with Spectral Factorization for Micro-video Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26579/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sequential recommendation aims to predict each user's next preferred item based on their historical interactions. Recently, diffusion-based approaches have demonstrated strong generative capability in modeling complex user preferences. However, they still face two inherent limitations: (i) Gaussian priors are misaligned with user-specific interests, and curved noise schedules lead to error accumulation and unstable training; (ii) the stochastic denoising process introduces additional randomness and substantial computational overhead. To address these issues, we propose FlowRec, a flow-matching-based framework that formulates preference evolution as continuous flows between personalized priors and target items. Specifically, FlowRec constructs an informative behavior-based prior distribution derived from users' historical interactions, offering a distributionally closer initialization to the target distribution. It then learns a vector field to guide straight preference flows toward target interests. Moreover, a single-step alignment objective with positive and negative samples further enhances semantic consistency between generated representations and ground-truth items. Finally, FlowRec adopts deterministic ODE-based generation, achieving efficient and stable inference. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that FlowRec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both recommendation accuracy and inference efficiency.