# Unified Interaction Foundational Model (UIFM) for Predicting Complex User and System Behavior

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06025 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06025/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP): A Unified Pretrain, Personalized Prompt & Predict Paradigm (P5)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13366/) (2022)
- [Session-based Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00855/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A central goal of artificial intelligence is to build systems that can understand and predict complex, evolving sequences of events. However, current foundation models, designed for natural language, fail to grasp the holistic nature of structured interactions found in domains like telecommunications, e-commerce and finance. By serializing events into text, they disassemble them into semantically fragmented parts, losing critical context. In this work, we introduce the Unified Interaction Foundation Model (UIFM), a foundation model engineered for genuine behavioral understanding. At its core is the principle of composite tokenization, where each multi-attribute event is treated as a single, semantically coherent unit. This allows UIFM to learn the underlying "grammar" of user behavior, perceiving entire interactions rather than a disconnected stream of data points. We demonstrate that this architecture is not just more accurate, but represents a fundamental step towards creating more adaptable and intelligent predictive systems.