Modeling User Preferences as Distributions for Optimal Transport-based Cross-domain Recommendation under Non-overlapping Settings

Abstract: Cross-Domain Recommender (CDR) systems aim to transfer knowledge from dense to sparse domains, alleviating data sparsity and cold-start issues in single-domain recommendation. While many methods assume overlapping users or items to connect domains, this is often unrealistic in real-world settings. Thus, non-overlapping CDR systems, which require no shared users or items, are needed. However, non-overlapping CDR is challenging due to: (1) the absence of overlap preventing direct bridges between domains, and (2) large distributional discrepancies degrading transfer performance. Moreover, most recommenders represent user preferences as discrete vectors, failing to capture their fine-grained, multi-faceted nature. We propose DUP-OT (Distributional User Preferences with Optimal Transport), a framework for non-overlapping CDR. DUP-OT has three stages: (1) Shared Preprocessing, where review-based embeddings and an autoencoder encode users and items from both domains; (2) User GMM Weight Learning, which models user preferences as Gaussian mixtures with learned weights; and (3) Cross-domain Rating Prediction, where optimal transport aligns Gaussian components across domains, enabling preference transfer from source to target. Experiments on Amazon review datasets show that DUP-OT effectively mitigates domain discrepancy and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under the non-overlapping CDR setting.