BAHSD: Bridging the Long-tail Gap via Adaptive Distillation in Black-box Sequential Recommendation

Abstract: Sequential recommendation systems are widely adopted but often deployed as black-box APIs, which has driven recent interest in model extraction to replicate their capabilities locally. However, the long-tail distribution induces severe signal heterogeneity: dense head sequences trigger the solidification of teacher preference, biasing extraction toward local patterns, while sparse tail sequences yield flat, noisy predictions. Existing one-size-fits-all extraction overlooks this disparity, resulting in noise overfitting and suboptimal knowledge transfer. We propose BAHSD, a black-box adaptive distillation framework that handles signal heterogeneity via a multi-scale consistency probing mechanism to implicitly quantify signal reliability. Based on this, an adaptive hierarchical objective is designed: dynamic-temperature KL divergence mitigates preference solidification for high-confidence signals, while ranking consistency and InfoNCE contrastive learning provide noise-robust enhancement for low-confidence signals. BAHSD consistently outperforms baselines, achieving up to 4.98\% gain over the teacher and 80\%+ improvement on tail users, offering a plug-and-play solution for high-fidelity black-box recommendation extraction.