MARS: Multi-resolution Adaptive Routing for Sequential Recommendation
Ming Yin, Sixun Dong, Yudong Liu, Wen-Yun Yang, Yunjiang Jiang, Yiran Chen
Abstract
Long-history recommenders often compress each user's history into a compact, candidate-independent memory that is cached and reused to score large candidate pools. We show that real user histories exhibit multi-scale semantic structure, with short-lived intent, medium-term interests, and long-term preferences coexisting in one sequence, and that monolithic cached memories preserve these scales unevenly: linear probes recover recent and mid-range content far worse than long-range content. We call this failure mode \textit{temporal aliasing}. We propose \textbf{MARS}, a multi-resolution user memory that writes the full history into recurrent state tracks anchored to different half-lives, and a sparse routing reader that materializes compact seed memories by selecting the relevant temporal resolutions for each seed, preserving fixed-size candidate scoring. MARS outperforms strong baselines on three public datasets, with gains that grow with history length. Component-matched ablations with paired tests show that temporal diversity and selective routing each contribute beyond what hard-window memories or added capacity provide. The advantage of MARS over its interface-matched baseline also widens after within-user behavioral shifts, at about $1.02\times$ that baseline's warm-cache serving latency for $1{,}000$ candidates per user.