Sequential recommendation aims to predict the next item from a user’s past interaction sequence, and has largely advanced around how accurately the ground-truth item is ranked. In practice, however, a recommendation list influences subsequent user behavior and item exposure, forming a closed-loop feedback process. As this process repeats it can lead to hot-item concentration and coverage collapse, which are difficult to capture by ranking accuracy alone. To address this problem we propose CLEREC, a closed-loop exposure-aware sequential recommendation framework. CLEREC separates a preference path from an exposure-aware path and integrates the exposure-aware information as a gated residual correction through a preference-conditioned fusion gate. On the H&M and Amazon Electronics datasets, CLEREC improves Hit@10 by 32.1% and 15.8%, respectively, over the no-prior setting. Moreover, by adjusting the strength of the popularity prior, it raises ranking accuracy while maintaining coverage of 0.359 on H&M and 0.427 on Electronics, thereby mitigating concentration of hot item. These results show that accuracy and exposure-related behavior should be evaluated jointly in closed-loop sequential recommendation and that CLEREC can serve to adjust the operating point between accuracy and coverage in recommendation settings where repeated item exposure matters.
28 February 2026 in The Journal of Korean Institute of Information Technology