MTSTRec: Multimodal Time-Aligned Shared Token Recommender

Sequential recommendation in e-commerce utilizes users’ anonymous browsing histories to personalize product suggestions without relying on private information. Existing item ID-based methods and multimodal models often overlook the temporal alignment of modalities like textual descriptions, visual content, and prices in user browsing sequences. To address this limitation, this paper proposes the Multimodal Time-aligned Shared Token Recommender (MTSTRec), a transformer-based framework with a single time-aligned shared token per product for efficient cross-modality fusion. MTSTRec preserves the distinct contributions of each modality while aligning them temporally to better capture user preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MTSTRec achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple sequential recommendation benchmarks, significantly improving upon existing multimodal fusion. Our code is available at https: //github. com/idssplab/MTSTRec.

Authors

• Ming-Yi Hong 0002
• Yen-Jung Hsu
• Miao-Chen Chiang
• Che Lin

Keywords

• Multimodal Sequential Recommendation
• Time-aligned Shared Token
• Image Style Representation
• Large Language Model