Embracing Plasticity: Balancing Stability and Plasticity in Continual Recommender Systems

Hyunsik Yoo, SeongKu Kang, Ruizhong Qiu, Charlie Xu, Fei Wang, Hanghang Tong

Abstract: In the era of big data and AI, recommender systems must adapt to evolving user preferences and new users/items to maintain high-quality recommendations. Fine-tuning, which updates model parameters using only new data, offers an efficient alternative to full retraining but struggles to balance stability (retaining past knowledge) and plasticity (adapting to new knowledge). While existing methods prioritize stability to address catastrophic forgetting, we argue that plasticity must also be explicitly strengthened, especially for users with rapidly changing preferences. In this work, we propose PlastIcity and StAbility balancing continual recommender systems (PISA), a novel framework that adaptively balances stability and plasticity based on user preference shifts. PISA quantifies preference shifts as changes in user distances to item clusters, and then guides user embeddings by prioritizing stability for stable users and plasticity for dynamic users. To achieve this, PISA leverages backward knowledge from the previous model and forward knowledge from fine-tuning on current data. During training, PISA maximizes mutual information between user-specific parameters and the relevant reference knowledge. Theoretically, we show that enhancing plasticity mitigates distribution shifts more effectively than fine-tuning alone. Empirically, extensive experiments on three real-world datasets validate PISA’s superiority over existing methods and highlight the contributions of its components.