# Multi-Behavior Sequential Modeling with Transition-Aware Graph Attention Network for E-Commerce Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14955 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14955/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2026.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (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)
- [Session-based Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00855/) (2018)
- [Multi-Behavior Hypergraph-Enhanced Transformer for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05584/) (2022)
- [TWIN: TWo-stage Interest Network for Lifelong User Behavior Modeling in CTR Prediction at Kuaishou](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02352/) (2023)
- [Learning from History and Present: Next-item Recommendation via Discriminatively Exploiting User Behaviors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01075/) (2018)
- [Beyond Clicks: Modeling Multi-Relational Item Graph for Session-Based Target Behavior Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07993/) (2020)
- [END4Rec: Efficient Noise-Decoupling for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17603/) (2024)
- [Personalized Behavior-Aware Transformer for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14473/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Multi-Behavior Sequence Modeling for Next Item Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12105/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

User interactions on e-commerce platforms are inherently diverse, involving behaviors such as clicking, favoriting, adding to cart, and purchasing. The transitions between these behaviors offer valuable insights into user-item interactions, serving as a key signal for understanding evolving preferences. Consequently, there is growing interest in leveraging multi-behavior data to better capture user intent. Recent studies have explored sequential modeling of multi-behavior data, many relying on transformer-based architectures with polynomial time complexity. While effective, these approaches often incur high computational costs, limiting their applicability in large-scale industrial systems with long user sequences. To address this challenge, we propose the Transition-Aware Graph Attention Network (TGA), a linear-complexity approach for modeling multi-behavior transitions. Unlike traditional transformers that treat all behavior pairs equally, TGA constructs a structured sparse graph by identifying informative transitions from three perspectives: (a) item-level transitions, (b) category-level transitions, and (c) neighbor-level transitions. Built upon the structured graph, TGA employs a transition-aware graph Attention mechanism that jointly models user-item interactions and behavior transition types, enabling more accurate capture of sequential patterns while maintaining computational efficiency. Experiments show that TGA outperforms all state-of-the-art models while significantly reducing computational cost. Notably, TGA has been deployed in a large-scale industrial production environment, where it leads to impressive improvements in key business metrics.