update on 05/23/2025: thx to Wentworth1028 and Tiny-Snow, we have LayerNorm update, for higher NDCG&HR, and here's the doc👍.

update on 04/13/2025: in https://arxiv.org/html/2504.09596v1, I listed the ideas worth to try but not yet due to my limited bandwidth in sparse time.

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modified based on paper author's tensorflow implementation, switching to PyTorch(v1.6) for simplicity, fixed issues like positional embedding usage etc. (making it harder to overfit, except for that, in recsys, personalization=overfitting sometimes)

code in python folder.

to train:

python main.py --dataset=ml-1m --train_dir=default --maxlen=200 --dropout_rate=0.2 --device=cuda

just inference:

python main.py --device=cuda --dataset=ml-1m --train_dir=default --state_dict_path=[YOUR_CKPT_PATH] --inference_only=true --maxlen=200

output for each run would be slightly random, as negative samples are randomly sampled, here's my output for two consecutive runs:

1st run - test (NDCG@10: 0.5897, HR@10: 0.8190)
2nd run - test (NDCG@10: 0.5918, HR@10: 0.8225)

pls check paper author's repo for detailed intro and more complete README, and here's the paper bib FYI :)

@inproceedings{kang2018self,
  title={Self-attentive sequential recommendation},
  author={Kang, Wang-Cheng and McAuley, Julian},
  booktitle={2018 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)},
  pages={197--206},
  year={2018},
  organization={IEEE}
}

I see a dozen of citations of the repo🫰, pls use the example bib as below if needed.

@online{huang2020sasrec_pytorch,
  author  = {Zan Huang},
  title   = {SASRec.pytorch},
  year    = {2020},
  url     = {https://github.com/pmixer/SASRec.pytorch},
  urldate = {2026-01-29}
}