DMSDRec: Dynamic Structure-Aware Graph Masked Autoencoder and Spatiotemporal Diffusion for Next-POI Recommendation

The rise of smart devices has accelerated location-based services, creating vast trajectory data for Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendations. However, user omissions or privacy concerns often result in incomplete trajectory data, compromising sequential patterns and spatiotemporal relationships. Existing solutions using graph structures, self-supervised learning (SSL), or spatiotemporal contexts still face two limitations: (1) graph-based and SSL methods produce suboptimal trajectory representations due to respective inherent constraints; (2) noise interference persists when modeling distorted spatiotemporal signals. To mitigate these issues, we propose a Dynamic Structure-aware Graph Masked Autoencoder and Spatiotemporal Diffusion for Next-POI Recommendation (DMSDRec). Specifically, we introduce a dynamic structure-aware improved graph masked autoencoder that adaptively and dynamically distills global transitional information for self-supervised augmentation. It naturally avoids the noise introduced by existing SSL methods’ dependency on manual views augmentation. Meanwhile, the masked reconstruction task synergistically enhances trajectory representations by capturing deeper cross-sequence dependencies. Additionally, we propose an effective latent-space spatiotemporal diffusion denoising method. First, we employ graph structures to model spatiotemporal relationships, utilizing higher-order structural information to alleviate the linear spatiotemporal relationship deviations caused by incomplete trajectories. Building on this, we implement diffusion models in the latent space to systematically identify and remove noise from spatiotemporal representations. Through experimental results on two real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed DMSDRec in terms of recommendation accuracy and robustness.