# CAMMSR: Category-Guided Attentive Mixture of Experts for Multimodal Sequential Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04320 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04320/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in MoE for recommender systems, one of 12 directions in Mixture-of-experts.
- Builds on 46 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- Mixture-of-experts / [MoE for recommender systems](https://mlsanity.com/moe/moe-for-recommender-systems/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [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)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01585/) (2016)
- [Personalized Top-N Sequential Recommendation via Convolutional Sequence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07426/) (2018)
- [Text Is All You Need: Learning Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13731/) (2023)
- [RecBole: Towards a Unified, Comprehensive and Efficient Framework for Recommendation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01731/) (2020)
- [Where to Go Next for Recommender Systems? ID- vs. Modality-based Recommender Models Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13835/) (2023)
- [Towards Universal Sequence Representation Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05941/) (2022)
- [Transformers without Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10622/) (2025)
- [A Tale of Two Graphs: Freezing and Denoising Graph Structures for Multimodal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06924/) (2022)
- [Frequency Enhanced Hybrid Attention Network for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09184/) (2023)
- [What to align in multimodal contrastive learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07402/) (2024)
- [Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10632/) (2023)
- [A Content-Driven Micro-Video Recommendation Dataset at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15379/) (2023)
- [Non-invasive Self-attention for Side Information Fusion in Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03578/) (2021)
- [LGMRec: Local and Global Graph Learning for Multimodal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16400/) (2023)
- [Harnessing Multimodal Large Language Models for Multimodal Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09698/) (2024)
- [Linear Recurrent Units for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02367/) (2023)
- [M3oE: Multi-Domain Multi-Task Mixture-of Experts Recommendation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18465/) (2024)
- [MISSRec: Pre-training and Transferring Multi-modal Interest-aware Sequence Representation for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11175/) (2023)
- [Decoupled Side Information Fusion for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11046/) (2022)
- [IISAN: Efficiently Adapting Multimodal Representation for Sequential Recommendation with Decoupled PEFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02059/) (2024)
- [MEANTIME: Mixture of Attention Mechanisms with Multi-temporal Embeddings for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08273/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The explosion of multimedia data in information-rich environments has intensified the challenges of personalized content discovery, positioning recommendation systems as an essential form of passive data management. Multimodal sequential recommendation, which leverages diverse item information such as text and images, has shown great promise in enriching item representations and deepening the understanding of user interests. However, most existing models rely on heuristic fusion strategies that fail to capture the dynamic and context-sensitive nature of user-modal interactions. In real-world scenarios, user preferences for modalities vary not only across individuals but also within the same user across different items or categories. Moreover, the synergistic effects between modalities-where combined signals trigger user interest in ways isolated modalities cannot-remain largely underexplored. To this end, we propose CAMMSR, a Category-guided Attentive Mixture of Experts model for Multimodal Sequential Recommendation. At its core, CAMMSR introduces a category-guided attentive mixture of experts (CAMoE) module, which learns specialized item representations from multiple perspectives and explicitly models inter-modal synergies. This component dynamically allocates modality weights guided by an auxiliary category prediction task, enabling adaptive fusion of multimodal signals. Additionally, we design a modality swap contrastive learning task to enhance cross-modal representation alignment through sequence-level augmentation. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that CAMMSR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating its effectiveness in achieving adaptive, synergistic, and user-centric multimodal sequential recommendation.