RecRec: Latent Interests Recursive Reasoning for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

Sequential recommender systems rely on a single forward pass to encode user interaction histories and predict the next item. Increasing inference-time computation through latent reasoning, with the model proceeding step by step before the final prediction, has been recently explored in sequential recommendation with promising results. However, how to structure the reasoning process for sequential recommendation remains an open question. Existing approaches couple reasoning and prediction in a single d-dimensional state, limiting reasoning depth and often relying on multi-stage pipelines with reinforcement learning (RL). We propose RecRec (Recursive Reasoning for Recommendation), an RL-free framework that decouples reasoning from prediction, overcoming the fixed d-dimensional state bottleneck of prior methods. RecRec consists of a Context Compressor and a Recursive Reasoner, trained in two simple supervised stages. The Context Compressor distills the backbone’s hidden states into a small set of latent interests, with an Interest Diversity Regularizer encouraging each interest to capture a distinct aspect of user behavior. The Recursive Reasoner then refines these interests by reasoning in a separate intermediate latent space. Deep supervision lets the reasoning depth be freely adjusted at inference without retraining. On four real-world datasets, RecRec outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning-enhanced methods, and on three of four datasets, gains extend past the training-time depth. Our findings point to a decoupled, multi-vector recipe that unleashes latent reasoning from the single-state bottleneck of prior methods, suggesting reasoning-state structure as a design axis to explore further in sequential recommendation.