HMAR: Hierarchical Masked Attention for Multi-behaviour Recommendation

In the context of recommendation systems, addressing multi-behavioral user interactions has become vital for understanding the evolving user behavior. Recent models utilize techniques like graph neural networks and attention mechanisms for modeling diverse behaviors, but capturing sequential patterns in historical interactions remains challenging. To tackle this, we introduce Hierarchical Masked Attention for multi-behavior recommendation (HMAR). Specifically, our approach applies masked self-attention to items of the same behavior, followed by self-attention across all behaviors. Additionally, we propose historical behavior indicators to encode the historical frequency of each item’s behavior in the input sequence. Furthermore, the HMAR model operates in a multi-task setting, allowing it to learn item behaviors and their associated ranking scores concurrently. Extensive experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code and datasets are available here (https://​github.​com/​Shereen-Elsayed/​HMAR).