  Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is a critical task in
location-based services that aim to provide personalized suggestions for the
user's next destination. Previous works on POI recommendation have laid focused
on modeling the user's spatial preference. However, existing works that
leverage spatial information are only based on the aggregation of users'
previous visited positions, which discourages the model from recommending POIs
in novel areas. This trait of position-based methods will harm the model's
performance in many situations. Additionally, incorporating sequential
information into the user's spatial preference remains a challenge. In this
paper, we propose Diff-POI: a Diffusion-based model that samples the user's
spatial preference for the next POI recommendation. Inspired by the wide
application of diffusion algorithm in sampling from distributions, Diff-POI
encodes the user's visiting sequence and spatial character with two
tailor-designed graph encoding modules, followed by a diffusion-based sampling
strategy to explore the user's spatial visiting trends. We leverage the
diffusion process and its reversed form to sample from the posterior
distribution and optimized the corresponding score function. We design a joint
training and inference framework to optimize and evaluate the proposed
Diff-POI. Extensive experiments on four real-world POI recommendation datasets
demonstrate the superiority of our Diff-POI over state-of-the-art baseline
methods. Further ablation and parameter studies on Diff-POI reveal the
functionality and effectiveness of the proposed diffusion-based sampling
strategy for addressing the limitations of existing methods.
