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arXiv · 2609.36671

FairDiff: Mitigating the Self-Reinforcing Matthew Effect in Diffusion Recommender Models

Song-Li Wu·Xianquan Wang·Zhaocheng Du·Weinan Gan·Jingyi Wang
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Abstract

While the "Matthew Effect" and filter bubbles are widely recognized outcome-level biases in recommender systems, we reveal that Diffusion Recommender Models (DRMs) uniquely compound this issue through their generative dynamics. Rather than merely inheriting data imbalances, DRMs trigger a self-reinforcing amplification of popularity bias. We identify that this phenomenon is driven by two compounding mechanisms. First, while optimization loss is universally dominated by high-frequency items across recommenders, DRMs suffer from a unique structural prior mismatch during generation. Because the forward terminal distribution of long-tailed data deviates significantly from the standard Gaussian prior, reverse sampling trajectories inherently collapse toward high-density popular items, fundamentally suppressing niche item generation. To dismantle this self-reinforcing loop, we propose FairDiff, a plug-and-play fairness-aware diffusion framework. To overcome the popularity-dominated loss, we introduce Popularity Condition Guidance (PCG). Rather than altering the training objective, PCG acts as an inference-time distributional reweighting mechanism, mathematically reshaping the score-based gradient field to penalize high-popularity regions and guide trajectories toward niche semantics. Furthermore, we design a Semantic Calibration (SC) Module to bridge the prior mismatch, aligning the forward and reverse distributions via one-step optimal transport. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that FairDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance while effectively mitigating the self-reinforcing Matthew Effect, highlighting its value as a general framework for DRMs.

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Song-Li Wu, Xianquan Wang, Zhaocheng Du, Weinan Gan, Jingyi Wang. 2026-09-29. FairDiff: Mitigating the Self-Reinforcing Matthew Effect in Diffusion Recommender Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36671

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