MIMA: Multi-Interest Recommendation via Multi-Positive Exclusive Assignment

Abstract

Multi-interest recommendation represents each user with multiple interest vectors for fine-grained candidate matching, yet it often suffers from interest collapse, where the learned interests converge to similar representations. We highlight the prevailing single-positive paradigm as one important factor behind this issue. Since each instance provides only one positive item, intents are optimized independently, potentially causing the same best-matching interest to be repeatedly updated toward different positives while leaving the others under-supervised. Moreover, existing methods rarely model how strongly a user activates each interest, leaving scores from different interest channels incomparable at inference. To address these problems, we propose MIMA, a Multi-Interest recommendation framework built on Multi-positive exclusive Assignment. MIMA groups items co-occurring within the same request into a positive set, generates complementary interests with a causal Transformer decoder, and exclusively assigns each positive to supervise a distinct interest via Hungarian matching, so that interest differentiation emerges from the training objective itself rather than auxiliary regularization. A lightweight routing module further estimates user-interest activation probabilities to calibrate scores across interest channels. Experiments on three public datasets and an industrial dataset show that MIMA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and an online A/B test yields significant business gains.