Collaborative filtering (CF) has been one of the most important and popular recommendation methods, which aims at predicting users' preferences (ratings) based on their past behaviors. Recently, various types of side information beyond the explicit ratings users give to items, such as social connections among users and metadata of items, have been introduced into CF and shown to be useful for improving recommendation performance. However, previous works process different types of information separately, thus failing to capture the correlations that might exist across them. To address this problem, in this work, we study the application of heterogeneous information network (HIN) to enhance CF-based recommendation methods. However, we face challenging issues in HIN-based recommendation, i.e., how to capture similarities of complex semantics between users and items in a HIN, and how to effectively fuse these similarities to improve final recommendation performance. To address these issues, we apply metagraph to similarity computation and solve the information fusion problem with a ``matrix factorization (MF) + factorization machine (FM)'' framework. For the MF part, we obtain the user-item similarity matrix from each metagraph and then apply low-rank matrix approximation to obtain latent features for both users and items. For the FM part, we apply FM with Group lasso (FMG) on the features obtained from the MF part to train the recommending model and, at the same time, identify the useful metagraphs. Besides FMG, a two-stage method, we further propose an end-to-end method, hierarchical attention fusing (HAF), to fuse metagraph based similarities for the final recommendation. Experimental results on four large real-world datasets show that the two proposed frameworks significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of recommendation performance.
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；MYbank, Ant Group（蚂蚁集团网商银行）
Recommender systems are fundamental information filtering techniques to recommend content or items that meet users' personalities and potential needs. As a crucial solution to address the difficulty of user identification and unavailability of historical information, session-based recommender systems provide recommendation services that only rely on users' behaviors in the current session. However, most existing studies are not well-designed for modeling heterogeneous user behaviors and capturing the relationships between them in practical scenarios. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose…
TAL AI Lab（好未来人工智能实验室）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
In modern recommender systems, both users and items are associated with rich side information, which can help understand users and items. Such information is typically heterogeneous and can be roughly categorized into flat and hierarchical side information. While side information has been proved to be valuable, the majority of existing systems have exploited either only flat side information or only hierarchical side information due to the challenges brought by the heterogeneity. In this paper, we investigate the problem of exploiting heterogeneous side information for recommendations. Specifi…
In recent years, deep neural network is introduced in recommender systems to solve the collaborative filtering problem, which has achieved immense success on computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing. On one hand, deep neural network can be used to model the auxiliary information in recommender systems. On the other hand, it is also capable of modeling nonlinear relationships between users and items. One advantage of deep neural network is that the performance of the algorithm can be easily enhanced by augmenting the depth of the neural network. However, two potential…
Peking University（北京大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations. Although several efforts have been made for CRS, two major issues still remain to be solved. First, the conversation data itself lacks of sufficient contextual information for accurately understanding users' preference. Second, there is a semantic gap between natural language expression and item-level user preference. To address these issues, we incorporate both word-oriented and entity-oriented knowledge graphs (KG) to enhance the data representations in CRSs, and adopt Mut…
Knowledge graph (KG) enhanced recommendation has demonstrated improved performance in the recommendation system (RecSys) and attracted considerable research interest. Recently the literature has adopted neural graph networks (GNNs) on the collaborative knowledge graph and built an end-to-end KG-enhanced RecSys. However, the majority of these approaches have three limitations: (1) treat the collaborative knowledge graph as a homogeneous graph and overlook the highly heterogeneous relationships among items, (2) lack of design to explicitly leverage the rich side information, and (3) overlook the…
This paper proposes a decentralized recommender system by formulating the popular collaborative filleting (CF) model into a decentralized matrix completion form over a set of users. In such a way, data storages and computations are fully distributed. Each user could exchange limited information with its local neighborhood, and thus it avoids the centralized fusion. Advantages of the proposed system include a protection on user privacy, as well as better scalability and robustness. We compare our proposed algorithm with several state-of-the-art algorithms on the FlickerUserFavor dataset, and de…
Synerise S.A.（Synerise股份公司）；Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）
Recommendation systems have lately been popularized globally, with primary use cases in online interaction systems, with significant focus on e-commerce platforms. We have developed a machine learning-based recommendation platform, which can be easily applied to almost any items and/or actions domain. Contrary to existing recommendation systems, our platform supports multiple types of interaction data with multiple modalities of metadata natively. This is achieved through multi-modal fusion of various data representations. We deployed the platform into multiple e-commerce stores of different k…
Capturing users' precise preferences is a fundamental problem in large-scale recommender system. Currently, item-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods are common matching approaches in industry. However, they are not effective to model dynamic and evolving preferences of users. In this paper, we propose a new sequential deep matching (SDM) model to capture users' dynamic preferences by combining short-term sessions and long-term behaviors. Compared with existing sequence-aware recommendation methods, we tackle the following two inherent problems in real-world applications: (1) there could…
Many recent advances in neural information retrieval models, which predict top-K items given a query, learn directly from a large training set of (query, item) pairs. However, they are often insufficient when there are many previously unseen (query, item) combinations, often referred to as the cold start problem. Furthermore, the search system can be biased towards items that are frequently shown to a query previously, also known as the 'rich get richer' (a.k.a. feedback loop) problem. In light of these problems, we observed that most online content platforms have both a search and a recommend…
Recommender System (RS) is an important online application that affects billions of users every day. The mainstream RS ranking framework is composed of two parts: a Multi-Task Learning model (MTL) that predicts various user feedback, i.e., clicks, likes, sharings, and a Multi-Task Fusion model (MTF) that combines the multi-task outputs into one final ranking score with respect to user satisfaction. There has not been much research on the fusion model while it has great impact on the final recommendation as the last crucial process of the ranking. To optimize long-term user satisfaction rather …
Existing sequential recommendation methods rely on large amounts of training data and usually suffer from the data sparsity problem. To tackle this, the pre-training mechanism has been widely adopted, which attempts to leverage large-scale data to perform self-supervised learning and transfer the pre-trained parameters to downstream tasks. However, previous pre-trained models for recommendation focus on leverage universal sequence patterns from user behaviour sequences and item information, whereas ignore capturing personalized interests with the heterogeneous user information, which has been …
Most current recommender systems used the historical behaviour data of user to predict user' preference. However, it is difficult to recommend items to new users accurately. To alleviate this problem, existing user cold start methods either apply deep learning to build a cross-domain recommender system or map user attributes into the space of user behaviour. These methods are more challenging when applied to online travel platform (e.g., Fliggy), because it is hard to find a cross-domain that user has similar behaviour with travel scenarios and the Location Based Services (LBS) information of …
Paper recommendation with user-generated keyword is to suggest papers that simultaneously meet user's interests and are relevant to the input keyword. This is a recommendation task with two queries, a.k.a. user ID and keyword. However, existing methods focus on recommendation according to one query, a.k.a. user ID, and are not applicable to solving this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel click-through rate (CTR) prediction model with heterogeneous graph neural network, called AMinerGNN, to recommend papers with two queries. Specifically, AMinerGNN constructs a heterogeneous graph to pr…
Recommender systems have played a critical role in many web applications to meet user's personalized interests and alleviate the information overload. In this survey, we review the development of recommendation frameworks with the focus on heterogeneous relational learning, which consists of different types of dependencies among users and items. The objective of this task is to map heterogeneous relational data into latent representation space, such that the structural and relational properties from both user and item domain can be well preserved. To address this problem, recent research devel…
Recent years have witnessed the fast development of the emerging topic of Graph Learning based Recommender Systems (GLRS). GLRS mainly employ the advanced graph learning approaches to model users' preferences and intentions as well as items' characteristics and popularity for Recommender Systems (RS). Differently from conventional RS, including content based filtering and collaborative filtering, GLRS are built on simple or complex graphs where various objects, e.g., users, items, and attributes, are explicitly or implicitly connected. With the rapid development of graph learning, exploring an…
Recommendation system is important to a content sharing/creating social network. Collaborative filtering is a widely-adopted technology in conventional recommenders, which is based on similarity between positively engaged content items involving the same users. Conventional collaborative filtering (CCF) suffers from cold start problem and narrow content diversity. We propose a new recommendation approach, heterogeneous collaborative filtering (HCF) to tackle these challenges at the root, while keeping the strength of collaborative filtering. We present two implementation algorithms of HCF for …
There exist situations of decision-making under information overload in the Internet, where people have an overwhelming number of available options to choose from, e.g. products to buy in an e-commerce site, or restaurants to visit in a large city. Recommender systems arose as a data-driven personalized decision support tool to assist users in these situations: they are able to process user-related data, filtering and recommending items based on the users preferences, needs and/or behaviour. Unlike most conventional recommender approaches where items are inanimate entities recommended to the u…
Deep learning-based sequential recommender systems have recently attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry. Most of industrial Embedding-Based Retrieval (EBR) system for recommendation share the similar ideas with sequential recommenders. Among them, how to comprehensively capture sequential user interest is a fundamental problem. However, most existing sequential recommendation models take as input clicked or purchased behavior sequences from user-item interactions. This leads to incomprehensive user representation and sub-optimal model performance, since they ignore the …
Recommender system (RS) has become a crucial module in most web-scale applications. Recently, most RSs are in the waterfall form based on the cloud-to-edge framework, where recommended results are transmitted to edge (e.g., user mobile) by computing in advance in the cloud server. Despite effectiveness, network bandwidth and latency between cloud server and edge may cause the delay for system feedback and user perception. Hence, real-time computing on edge could help capture user preferences more preciously and thus make more satisfactory recommendations. Our work, to our best knowledge, is th…
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have shown great success in recommendation. This is attributed to the rich attribute information contained in KG to improve item and user representations as side information. However, existing knowledge-aware methods leverage attribute information at a coarse-grained level both in item and user side. In this paper, we proposed a novel attentive knowledge graph attribute network(AKGAN) to learn item attributes and user interests via attribute information in KG. Technically, AKGAN adopts a heterogeneous graph neural network framework, which has a different design between t…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
Top-$N$ recommender systems have been extensively studied. However, the sparsity of user-item activities has not been well resolved. While many hybrid systems were proposed to address the cold-start problem, the profile information has not been sufficiently leveraged. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of profiles between users and items intensifies the challenge. In this paper, we propose a content-based top-$N$ recommender system by learning the global term weights in profiles. To achieve this, we bring in PathSim, which could well measures the node similarity with heterogeneous relations (betwe…
The University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；University of Technology, Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）
Recommendation represents a vital stage in developing and promoting the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT). Traditional recommender systems fail to exploit ever-growing, dynamic, and heterogeneous IoT data. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art recommender systems, as well as related techniques and application in the vibrant field of IoT. We discuss several limitations of applying recommendation systems to IoT and propose a reference framework for comparing existing studies to guide future research and practices.
Recommendations are broadly used in marketplaces to match users with items relevant to their interests and needs. To understand user intent and tailor recommendations to their needs, we use deep learning to explore various heterogeneous data available in marketplaces. This paper focuses on the challenge of measuring recommender performance and summarizes the online experiment results with several promising types of deep neural network recommenders - hybrid item representation models combining features from user engagement and content, sequence-based models, and multi-armed bandit models that o…
Content recommender systems are generally adept at maximizing immediate user satisfaction but to optimize for the \textit{long-run} user value, we need more statistically sophisticated solutions than off-the-shelf simple recommender algorithms. In this paper we lay out such a solution to optimize \textit{long-run} user value through discounted utility maximization and a machine learning method we have developed for estimating it. Our method estimates which content producers are most likely to create the highest long-run user value if their content is shown more to users who enjoy it in the pre…
A large number of empirical studies on applying self-attention models in the domain of recommender systems are based on offline evaluation and metrics computed on standardized datasets, without insights on how these models perform in real life scenarios. Moreover, many of them do not consider information such as item and customer metadata, although deep-learning recommenders live up to their full potential only when numerous features of heterogeneous types are included. Also, typically recommendation models are designed to serve well only a single use case, which increases modeling complexity …
Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）
Recommender systems have achieved great success in modeling user's preferences on items and predicting the next item the user would consume. Recently, there have been many efforts to utilize time information of users' interactions with items to capture inherent temporal patterns of user behaviors and offer timely recommendations at a given time. Existing studies regard the time information as a single type of feature and focus on how to associate it with user preferences on items. However, we argue they are insufficient for fully learning the time information because the temporal patterns of u…
In this paper, based on the user-tag-object tripartite graphs, we propose a recommendation algorithm, which considers social tags as an important role for information retrieval. Besides its low cost of computational time, the experiment results of two real-world data sets, \emph{Del.icio.us} and \emph{MovieLens}, show it can enhance the algorithmic accuracy and diversity. Especially, it can obtain more personalized recommendation results when users have diverse topics of tags. In addition, the numerical results on the dependence of algorithmic accuracy indicates that the proposed algorithm is …
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）
The ACM RecSys Challenge 2018 focuses on music recommendation in the context of automatic playlist continuation. In this paper, we describe our approach to the problem and the final hybrid system that was submitted to the challenge by our team Cocoplaya. This system consists in combining the recommendations produced by two different models using ranking fusion. The first model is based on Matrix Factorization and it incorporates information from tracks' audio and playlist titles. The second model generates recommendations based on typical track co-occurrences considering their proximity in the…
The scientific literature is a large information network linking various actors (laboratories, companies, institutions, etc.). The vast amount of data generated by this network constitutes a dynamic heterogeneous attributed network (HAN), in which new information is constantly produced and from which it is increasingly difficult to extract content of interest. In this article, I present my first thesis works in partnership with an industrial company, Digital Scientific Research Technology. This later offers a scientific watch tool, Peerus, addressing various issues, such as the real time recom…
The Diversity Paradox revisited: Systemic Effects of Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems
Scuola Normale Superiore and Università di Pisa（诺莱规范大学和比萨大学）；Scuola Normale Superiore（诺莱规范大学）；Sciences Po Paris（巴黎社会科学高等研究院）；Università di Pisa（比萨大学）；CNR and Scuola Normale Superiore（意大利国家研究委员会和诺莱规范大学）
