# From Agnostic to Specific: Latent Preference Diffusion for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23132 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23132/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Diffusion-LM Improves Controllable Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14217/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06978/) (2017)
- [Style Injection in Diffusion: A Training-free Approach for Adapting Large-scale Diffusion Models for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09008/) (2023)
- [Bringing Old Photos Back to Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09484/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Scaling Diffusion Transformers to 16 Billion Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11633/) (2024)
- [PLANNER: Generating Diversified Paragraph via Latent Language Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02531/) (2023)
- [Multi-Behavior Hypergraph-Enhanced Transformer for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05584/) (2022)
- [Graph Meta Network for Multi-Behavior Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03969/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Meta Learning with Behavior Multiplicity for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08523/) (2022)
- [EC-DIT: Scaling Diffusion Transformers with Adaptive Expert-Choice Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02098/) (2024)
- [Multiplex Behavioral Relation Learning for Recommendation via Memory Augmented Transformer Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04002/) (2021)
- [DimeRec: A Unified Framework for Enhanced Sequential Recommendation via Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12153/) (2024)
- [ContrastVAE: Contrastive Variational AutoEncoder for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00456/) (2022)
- [Discrete Conditional Diffusion for Reranking in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06982/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-behavior sequential recommendation (MBSR) aims to learn the dynamic and heterogeneous interactions of users' multi-behavior sequences, so as to capture user preferences under target behavior for the next interacted item prediction. Unlike previous methods that adopt unidirectional modeling by mapping auxiliary behaviors to target behavior, recent concerns are shifting from behavior-fixed to behavior-specific recommendation. However, these methods still ignore the user's latent preference that underlying decision-making, leading to suboptimal solutions. Meanwhile, due to the asymmetric deterministic between items and behaviors, discriminative paradigm based on preference scoring is unsuitable to capture the uncertainty from low-entropy behaviors to high-entropy items, failing to provide efficient and diverse recommendation. To address these challenges, we propose FatsMB, a framework based diffusion model that guides preference generation textitFrom Behavior-Agnostic To Behavior-Specific in latent spaces, enabling diverse and accurate textitMulti-Behavior Sequential Recommendation. Specifically, we design a Multi-Behavior AutoEncoder (MBAE) to construct a unified user latent preference space, facilitating interaction and collaboration across Behaviors, within Behavior-aware RoPE (BaRoPE) employed for multiple information fusion. Subsequently, we conduct target behavior-specific preference transfer in the latent space, enriching with informative priors. A Multi-Condition Guided Layer Normalization (MCGLN) is introduced for the denoising. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.