  Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) is a promising paradigm inspired by
transfer learning to solve the cold-start problem in recommender systems.
Existing state-of-the-art CDR methods train an explicit mapping function to
transfer the cold-start users from a data-rich source domain to a target
domain. However, a limitation of these methods is that the mapping function is
trained on overlapping users across domains, while only a small number of
overlapping users are available for training. By visualizing the loss landscape
of the existing CDR model, we find that training on a small number of
overlapping users causes the model to converge to sharp minima, leading to poor
generalization. Based on this observation, we leverage loss-geometry-based
machine learning approach and propose a novel CDR method called Sharpness-Aware
CDR (SCDR). Our proposed method simultaneously optimizes recommendation loss
and loss sharpness, leading to better generalization with theoretical
guarantees. Empirical studies on real-world datasets demonstrate that SCDR
significantly outperforms the other CDR models for cold-start recommendation
tasks, while concurrently enhancing the model's robustness to adversarial
attacks.
