mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

RouteRec: Behavior-Guided Sparse Routing for Sequential Recommendation

arXiv 2609.39007 ↗First posted 30 Sep 2026cs.IR cs.LGcited by 0

On the map: Mixture-of-experts → MoE for recommender systems

Abstract (arXiv)

Sessionized interaction histories contain behavioral patterns that can improve sequential recommendation. However, existing models process all sessions through the same parameterized blocks, regardless of their behavioral differences. Mixture of Experts (MoE) enables conditional computation, but it leaves open what should guide expert allocation. We propose RouteRec, a sequential recommender that uses observed session behavior as the routing criterion. RouteRec summarizes four types of behavioral evidence from sessionized histories: interaction tempo, item-group focus, repetition and carryover, and popularity tendency. It uses these cues to route computation at macro, mid, and micro scopes. Cue-derived scores first select expert groups; within each selected group, the current backbone state then refines expert selection. Across six public datasets and 18 dataset-metric combinations, RouteRec ranks first in 12 and second in three, yielding the best overall average rank of 1.61 compared with 4.11 for the next-best baseline. Additional analyses suggest that the behavioral cues guide expert allocation beyond added capacity and produce routing patterns aligned with observed behavior. Our code is available at https://github.com/jy1559/RouteRec

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 23 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2026.

Builds on

23 of 40 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Hierarchical Time-Aware Mixture of Experts for Multi-Modal Sequential Recommendation24 Jan
  2. 2024Facet-Aware Multi-Head Mixture-of-Experts Model for Sequential Recommendation3 Nov

Other references · 21

  1. 2017Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layercited by 3,509
  2. 2021Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsitycited by 3,073
  3. 2018Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendationcited by 1,184
  4. 2019BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformercited by 964
  5. 2015Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networkscited by 695
  6. 2018Personalized Top-N Sequential Recommendation via Convolutional Sequence Embeddingcited by 476
  7. 2017Neural Attentive Session-based Recommendationcited by 237
  8. 2021Contrastive Learning for Representation Degeneration Problem in Sequential Recommendationcited by 121
  9. 2022KuaiRec: A Fully-observed Dataset and Insights for Evaluating Recommender Systemscited by 96
  10. 2015Inferring Networks of Substitutable and Complementary Productscited by 92
  11. 2023Frequency Enhanced Hybrid Attention Network for Sequential Recommendationcited by 52
  12. 2018RepeatNet: A Repeat Aware Neural Recommendation Machine for Session-based Recommendationcited by 51
9 more
  1. 2023A Survey on Popularity Bias in Recommender Systemscited by 43
  2. 2020A Critical Study on Data Leakage in Recommender System Offline Evaluationcited by 39
  3. 2022Decoupled Side Information Fusion for Sequential Recommendationcited by 30
  4. 2023An Attentive Inductive Bias for Sequential Recommendation beyond the Self-Attentioncited by 28
  5. 2023Language-Routing Mixture of Experts for Multilingual and Code-Switching Speech Recognitioncited by 26
  6. 2023DAMEX: Dataset-aware Mixture-of-Experts for visual understanding of mixture-of-datasetscited by 23
  7. 2020Session-aware Recommendation: A Surprising Quest for the State-of-the-artcited by 15
  8. 2025Time to Split: Exploring Data Splitting Strategies for Offline Evaluation of Sequential Recommenderscited by 12
  9. 2024SIGMA: Selective Gated Mamba for Sequential Recommendationcited by 10

Built on by

Not cited yet.

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2024SLMRec: Distilling Large Language Models into Small for Sequential Recommendation
  2. 2026Mixture of Sequence: Theme-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Long-Sequence Recommendation
  3. 2025DTRec: Learning Dynamic Reasoning Trajectories for Sequential Recommendation
  4. 2025Slow Thinking for Sequential Recommendation
  5. 2026ChainRec: An Agentic Recommender Learning to Route Tool Chains for Diverse and Evolving Interests
  6. 2023Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion
  7. 2026MARS: Multi-resolution Adaptive Routing for Sequential Recommendation
  8. 2025What Makes LLMs Effective Sequential Recommenders? A Study on Preference Intensity and Temporal Context