RecPFN: Prior-Fitted Networks for In-Context-Based Recommendations

📅 2026-08-20
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
本文提出RecPFN网络,通过预训练于合成点击流环境来实现基于上下文的推荐,无需权重更新即可生成预测,解决低计算和低数据条件下的推荐问题。
📝 Abstract
We introduce RecPFN, a prior-fitted network that brings in-context learning to sequential recommendation. RecPFN is pretrained entirely on synthetic clickstream environments sampled from a broad structural causal prior, enabling it to amortize Bayesian-style inference from a small support set. At inference, a lightweight decoder-only transformer conditions on a handful of domain sequences and produces next-item predictions for queries in a single forward pass, without any weight updates. Across eight public benchmarks, RecPFN achives state-of-the-art zero-shot performance while remaining strongly competitive with supervised methods in low-compute and low-data regimes. It is deployment-efficient and robust to domain shift, outperforming strong zero-shot baselines that rely on large real-interaction corpora. RecPFN provides a practical path toward generalizable, data-efficient recommenders and opens avenues for richer priors, longer-context ICL, and multimodal extensions. Code for training and evaluation is publicly available at https://github.com/SAP-samples/tabular-ai-recpfn/.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

sequential recommendation
in-context learning
zero-shot performance
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

in-context learning
prior-fitted networks
zero-shot performance
data-efficient recommenders
E
En Zhi Tan
SAP SE, Singapore
J
Jia Xiang Lim
SAP SE, Singapore
B
Bryan Lijie Chew
SAP SE, Singapore
T
Tze Minh Ng
SAP SE, Singapore
B
Benjamin Yan Han Yap
SAP SE, Singapore