Anatomy of a Decision: Uncertainty-aware Hierarchical Intent Learning via Flow Matching for Multimodal Recommendation

Abstract

Modeling the underlying user intent is crucial for recommendation, but existing methods struggle with the inherent uncertainty and the dynamic, hierarchical nature of user interests. Current approaches often rely on clustering or prototype learning to discover a static set of intents. However, they face two critical challenges: (1) they overlook the uncertainty inherent in multimodal features; and (2) they assume a static and flat intent structure, failing to adapt to a user's varying decision certainty. To address these limitations, we propose UHIFlow, an Uncertainty-aware Hierarchical Intent learning framework via Flow matching. First, our Cross-modal Uncertainty Synergistic Modeling (CUSM) module leverages conditional flow matching to quantify uncertainty from visual and textual modalities and synergistically align them. Subsequently, the Uncertainty-guided Hierarchical Intent Generation (UHIG) module uses this quantified uncertainty to dynamically construct a personalized intent hierarchy, generating coarse-grained intents for uncertain users and fine-grained ones for users with clear preferences. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that UHIFlow significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.