# CaST-POI: Candidate-Conditioned Spatiotemporal Modeling for Next POI Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.20845 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20845/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Personalized Top-N Sequential Recommendation via Convolutional Sequence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07426/) (2018)
- [Deep Interest Evolution Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03672/) (2018)
- [Session-based Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00855/) (2018)
- [Neural Attentive Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04725/) (2017)
- [Search-based User Interest Modeling with Lifelong Sequential Behavior Data for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05639/) (2020)
- [RecBole: Towards a Unified, Comprehensive and Efficient Framework for Recommendation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01731/) (2020)
- [Behavior Sequence Transformer for E-commerce Recommendation in Alibaba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06874/) (2019)
- [STAN: Spatio-Temporal Attention Network for Next Location Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04095/) (2021)
- [GETNext: Trajectory Flow Map Enhanced Transformer for Next POI Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04741/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Next Point-of-Interest Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17591/) (2024)
- [CORE: Simple and Effective Session-based Recommendation within Consistent Representation Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11067/) (2022)
- [TWIN V2: Scaling Ultra-Long User Behavior Sequence Modeling for Enhanced CTR Prediction at Kuaishou](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16357/) (2024)
- [Generative Next POI Recommendation with Semantic ID](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01375/) (2025)
- [CoMaPOI: A Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Next POI Prediction Bridging the Gap Between Trajectory and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23837/) (2025)
- [Learning Time Slot Preferences via Mobility Tree for Next POI Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12100/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Learning Where to Embed: Noise-Aware Positional Embedding for Query Retrieval in Small-Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15065/) (2026)
- [HGSQ: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for Real-Time Aerial Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13306/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation ranks a user's likely next location based on check-in history. Most recent rankers compress the trajectory into a single user vector and score every candidate through the same representation, ignoring that every candidate carries geographic coordinates and that the relevance of a past visit depends on where the candidate is located. Target attention from click-through-rate prediction conditions the user representation on the scored item, but its operator was developed for web items without geometry. This paper proposes CaST-POI, a candidate-conditioned POI ranker that keeps a standard target-attention reader and adds two bucketised biases to the attention logits: one for the recency of each past visit and another for its distance to the candidate being scored. Different candidates therefore read the same trajectory with different attention weights, grounded in real geographic distance rather than inferred from item embeddings. Comparing against seven sequential recommenders trained with the same split on three datasets NYC, TKY and CA under per-user leave-one-out with full-vocabulary ranking, CaST-POI improves MRR over the strongest baseline by 5.1%, 7.6% and 14.5%. Holm-corrected paired tests confirm the gains on TKY and CA. Ablation study locates the gain in the explicit revisit gate and the candidate-relative spatial bias, whereas the candidate-independent temporal bias has no measurable effect on all datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/CaST-POI.