Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Adaptive Test-Time Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract: Test-time augmentation (TTA) has become a promising approach for mitigating data sparsity in sequential recommendation by improving inference accuracy without requiring costly model retraining. However, existing TTA methods typically rely on uniform, user-agnostic augmentation strategies. We show that this "one-size-fits-all" design is inherently suboptimal, as it neglects substantial behavioral heterogeneity across users, and empirically demonstrate that the optimal augmentation operators vary significantly across user sequences with different characteristics for the first time. To address this limitation, we propose AdaTTA, a plug-and-play reinforcement learning-based adaptive inference framework that learns to select sequence-specific augmentation operators on a per-sequence basis. We formulate augmentation selection as a Markov Decision Process and introduce an Actor-Critic policy network with hybrid state representations and a joint macro-rank reward design to dynamically determine the optimal operator for each input user sequence. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets and two recommendation backbones demonstrate that AdaTTA consistently outperforms the best fixed-strategy baselines, achieving up to 26.31% relative improvement on the Home dataset while incurring only moderate computational overhead