Dual-Perspective Disentanglement: Learning Symmetric Group-Aware Representations for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Abstract Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) transfers user preferences from a source domain to alleviate data sparsity in a target domain. While disentangling representations into domain-specific and shared components is a common method, existing methods overlook user preference heterogeneity and item appeal heterogeneity. To this end, we propose DPGCDR, a Dual-Perspective Group-aware CDR method that learns symmetric group-aware representations from both user and item. Conceptually, DPGCDR dynamically clusters users into groups and items into themes, then symmetrically disentangles user preferences into group-specific and cross-group shared components, and item attributes into theme-specific and cross-theme shared components. We propose a two-stage training scheme: 1) an initial warm-up stage learns preliminary representations to dynamically cluster users and items into group and theme structures which generalize cross-domain scenarios into multi-group disentanglement analogous to multi-domain settings; 2) a fusion-based aggregation stage integrates these group/theme-specific components into unified global representations. Additionally, an information-theoretic alignment regularizer further ensures consistency and discriminability between global shared and group/theme-specific representations, facilitating effective knowledge transfer by explicitly modeling and preserving the inherent multi-group structure within cross-domain interactions. Extensive experiments show DPGCDR achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant gains of up to 25% in HR@10 over baselines on datasets with heterogeneous interaction structures. Further analyses confirm our dynamic clustering mechanism effectively adapts to underlying data patterns, enabling fine-grained cross-domain knowledge transfer.