PDFlow: Popularity-Debiased Flow Matching for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

Generative models have emerged as a powerful paradigm in sequential recommendation due to their superior distribution modeling. However, long-tail data distributions inevitably induce popularity bias, as iterative generation trajectories gravitate toward dense clusters of popular items. Current debiasing methods struggle to enforce consistent step-wise constraints, rendering them ineffective for the multi-step process of generative recommendation. To address this challenge, we propose a method called Popularity-Debiased Flow Matching for sequential recommendation (PDFlow). Specifically, grounded in the flow matching framework, PDFlow integrates a residual popularity vector field beyond the main flow to model the popularity debiasing flow at each step. This enables real-time trajectory intervention to adjust the generative path, preventing the model from overemphasizing popular items. Subsequently, we incorporate cross-popularity alignment loss, using co-occurrence patterns within the same sequence to align features of both popular and tail items, thereby mitigating popularity-driven distribution separation. Jointly, trajectory correction prevents popularity overfitting while cross-popularity alignment ensures latent fairness, effectively mitigating popularity bias. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PDFlow in improving long-tail coverage and overall recommendation performance. All codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/eqmll/PDFlow.