ProRec-Video: Guiding Hierarchical Interest Transitions for Proactive Short Video Recommendation with Dynamic Feedback Adaptation

Abstract

Traditional short video recommendations primarily enhance user retention by reinforcing existing user preferences, potentially leading to information cocoons. Conversely, proactive recommendations aim to diversify user interests by exposing users to content beyond their historical preferences. However, current proactive approaches face three limitations: (1) homogeneous receptivity assumption, neglecting individual differences in users' openness to new interests; (2) short-term item exposure without interest anchoring, focusing on item-level shifts rather than interest evolution; and (3) static feedback utilization, failing to incorporate dynamic user feedback during the recommendation adequately. To address these challenges, we propose ProRec-Video, a proactive framework that guides hierarchical interest transitions through three innovations. First, User Receptivity Profiling assesses individual openness for new interests, ensuring personalized transition pacing. Second, Hierarchical Interest Transition Planning decomposes complex interest shifts into intermediate steps to generate smooth interest transition paths and semantically coherent video sequences, addressing overemphasis on item exposure. Third, Dynamic Feedback Adaptation integrates agent-based simulation and Reflexion mechanisms to refine interest transition paths and video sequences based on real-time user feedback, enhancing adaptability and satisfaction. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that ProRec-Video achieves a significant improvement in proactive recommendation performance, with an interest transition success rate of 85% and a user satisfaction rate of 78.3%.