D2TCDR: Disentangled Diffusion-Based Transfer for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) aims to alleviate data sparsity in the target domain by incorporating knowledge from external domains. Existing approaches typically rely on overlapping users between the source and target domains as a bridge for knowledge transfer. However, in practice, user information across domains is often unavailable due to privacy protection, platform isolation, and data sharing restrictions, rendering most methods ineffective. In this article, we propose the D2TCDR, a two-stage generative CDR framework to address this critical limitation. By modeling the domain-level distribution that captures user preferences shared across domains, we extract transferable knowledge and guide its transfer through a generative process, reducing reliance on overlapping users and alleviating data sparsity in the target domain. D2TCDR first proposes a domain disentanglement module to extract the domain-invariant representations, capturing shared preferences across domains by eliminating domain-specific interference. Subsequently, a guided diffusion model is designed to model the domain-level distribution of these domain-invariant representations. By injecting target-domain signals into the guided diffusion model, we further steer the learned distribution toward the target domain, achieving knowledge transfer without relying on overlapping users. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-domain datasets show the superior performance of D2TCDR, validating its recommendation capabilities in complex transfer scenarios.