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We determine a transformation of user features, e.g., user social relations and historical interactions between warm users and their interested items, into a latent space so that the loss function is set by user feature reconstruction and by feature and distribution matching in the heterogeneous domains. The resulting optimization problem can be solved by matrix eigendecomposition, and the cold-start users\u2019 preferences can thus be obtained. We also extend the proposed model using neural networks. We perform extensive experiments on several real-world datasets, and the results in terms of Precision, Recall, NDCG, and Hit Rate verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3746637","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,7,1]],"date-time":"2025-07-01T12:25:42Z","timestamp":1751372742000},"page":"1-26","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Cold-start User Recommendation via Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"43","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3565-6635","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Hanrui","family":"Wu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0008-4062-771X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yanxin","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-4566-7445","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Nuosi","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6079-2818","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jia","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Jinan University, Guangzhou, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1891-6186","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yonghui","family":"Xu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Joint SDU-NTU Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, Shandong University, Jinan, China, and China-Singapore International Joint Research Institute, Guangzhou, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6833-5227","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Michael","family":"K. 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