Currently, there starts a research trend to leverage neural architecture for recommendation systems. Though several deep recommender models are proposed, most methods are too simple to characterize users' complex preference. In this paper, for a fine-grain analysis, users' ratings are explained from multiple perspectives, based on which, we propose our neural architecture. Specifically, our model employs several sequential stages to encode the user and item into hidden representations. In one stage, the user and item are represented from multiple perspectives and in each perspective, the representations of user and item put attentions to each other. Last, we metric the output representations of final stage to approach the users' rating. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves substantial improvements against baselines.
Maastricht University（马斯特里赫特大学）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）
Deep learning has proved an effective means to capture the non-linear associations of user preferences. However, the main drawback of existing deep learning architectures is that they follow a fixed recommendation strategy, ignoring users' real time-feedback. Recent advances of deep reinforcement strategies showed that recommendation policies can be continuously updated while users interact with the system. In doing so, we can learn the optimal policy that fits to users' preferences over the recommendation sessions. The main drawback of deep reinforcement strategies is that are based on predef…
PSL: Rethinking and Improving Softmax Loss from Pairwise Perspective for Recommendation
State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University（区块链与数据安全国家重点实验室，浙江大学）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（计算机科学与技术学院，浙江大学）
Session-based recommendation is an important task for e-commerce services, where a large number of users browse anonymously or may have very distinct interests for different sessions. In this paper we present one of the winning solutions for the Recommendation task of the SIGIR 2021 Workshop on E-commerce Data Challenge. Our solution was inspired by NLP techniques and consists of an ensemble of two Transformer architectures - Transformer-XL and XLNet - trained with autoregressive and autoencoding approaches. To leverage most of the rich dataset made available for the competition, we describe h…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
The search space of neural architecture search (NAS) for convolutional neural network (CNN) is huge. To reduce searching cost, most NAS algorithms use fixed outer network level structure, and search the repeatable cell structure only. Such kind of fixed architecture performs well when enough cells and channels are used. However, when the architecture becomes more lightweight, the performance decreases significantly. To obtain better lightweight architectures, more flexible and diversified neural architectures are in demand, and more efficient methods should be designed for larger search space.…
TriMLP: Revenge of a MLP-like Architecture in Sequential Recommendation
Jilin University（吉林大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
With growing consumer adoption of online grocery shopping through platforms such as Amazon Fresh, Instacart, and Walmart Grocery, there is a pressing business need to provide relevant recommendations throughout the customer journey. In this paper, we introduce a production within-basket grocery recommendation system, RTT2Vec, which generates real-time personalized product recommendations to supplement the user's current grocery basket. We conduct extensive offline evaluation of our system and demonstrate a 9.4% uplift in prediction metrics over baseline state-of-the-art within-basket recommend…
Explainable recommendation attempts to develop models that generate not only high-quality recommendations but also intuitive explanations. The explanations may either be post-hoc or directly come from an explainable model (also called interpretable or transparent model in some contexts). Explainable recommendation tries to address the problem of why: by providing explanations to users or system designers, it helps humans to understand why certain items are recommended by the algorithm, where the human can either be users or system designers. Explainable recommendation helps to improve the tran…
Traditionally, especially in academic research in recommender systems, the focus has been solely on the satisfaction of the end-user. While user satisfaction has, indeed, been associated with the success of the business, it is not the only factor. In many recommendation domains, there are other stakeholders whose needs should be taken into account in the recommendation generation and evaluation. In this dissertation, I describe the notion of multi-stakeholder recommendation. In particular, I study one of the most important challenges in recommendation research, popularity bias, from a multi-st…
In academic research, recommender systems are often evaluated on benchmark datasets, without much consideration about the global timeline. Hence, we are unable to answer questions like: Do loyal users enjoy better recommendations than non-loyal users? Loyalty can be defined by the time period a user has been active in a recommender system, or by the number of historical interactions a user has. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive analysis of recommendation results along global timeline. We conduct experiments with five widely used models, i.e., BPR, NeuMF, LightGCN, SASRec and TiSASRec, on…
The interventional nature of recommendation has attracted increasing attention in recent years. It particularly motivates researchers to formulate learning and evaluating recommendation as causal inference and data missing-not-at-random problems. However, few take seriously the consequence of violating the critical assumption of overlapping, which we prove can significantly threaten the validity and interpretation of the outcome. We find a critical piece missing in the current understanding of information retrieval (IR) systems: as interventions, recommendation not only affects the already obs…
Recommender systems learn from historical user-item interactions to identify preferred items for target users. These observed interactions are usually unbalanced following a long-tailed distribution. Such long-tailed data lead to popularity bias to recommend popular but not personalized items to users. We present a gradient perspective to understand two negative impacts of popularity bias in recommendation model optimization: (i) the gradient direction of popular item embeddings is closer to that of positive interactions, and (ii) the magnitude of positive gradient for popular items are much g…
To maximize cumulative user engagement (e.g. cumulative clicks) in sequential recommendation, it is often needed to tradeoff two potentially conflicting objectives, that is, pursuing higher immediate user engagement (e.g., click-through rate) and encouraging user browsing (i.e., more items exposured). Existing works often study these two tasks separately, thus tend to result in sub-optimal results. In this paper, we study this problem from an online optimization perspective, and propose a flexible and practical framework to explicitly tradeoff longer user browsing length and high immediate use…
Though recommender systems are defined by personalization, recent work has shown the importance of additional, beyond-accuracy objectives, such as fairness. Because users often expect their recommendations to be purely personalized, these new algorithmic objectives must be communicated transparently in a fairness-aware recommender system. While explanation has a long history in recommender systems research, there has been little work that attempts to explain systems that use a fairness objective. Even though the previous work in other branches of AI has explored the use of explanations as a to…
Over the past 10 years, many recommendation techniques have been based on embedding users and items in latent vector spaces, where the inner product of a (user,item) pair of vectors represents the predicted affinity of the user to the item. A wealth of literature has focused on the various modeling approaches that result in embeddings, and has compared their quality metrics, learning complexity, etc. However, much less attention has been devoted to the issues surrounding productization of an embeddings-based high throughput, low latency recommender system. In particular, how the system might k…
Personalized recommendations are one of the most widely deployed machine learning (ML) workload serviced from cloud datacenters. As such, architectural solutions for high-performance recommendation inference have recently been the target of several prior literatures. Unfortunately, little have been explored and understood regarding the training side of this emerging ML workload. In this paper, we first perform a detailed workload characterization study on training recommendations, root-causing sparse embedding layer training as one of the most significant performance bottlenecks. We then propo…
On-device Content-based Recommendation with Single-shot Embedding Pruning: A Cooperative Game Perspective
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
As a key application of artificial intelligence, recommender systems are among the most pervasive computer aided systems to help users find potential items of interests. Recently, researchers paid considerable attention to fairness issues for artificial intelligence applications. Most of these approaches assumed independence of instances, and designed sophisticated models to eliminate the sensitive information to facilitate fairness. However, recommender systems differ greatly from these approaches as users and items naturally form a user-item bipartite graph, and are collaboratively correlate…
Modern recommender systems aim to improve user experience. As reinforcement learning (RL) naturally fits this objective -- maximizing an user's reward per session -- it has become an emerging topic in recommender systems. Developing RL-based recommendation methods, however, is not trivial due to the \emph{offline training challenge}. Specifically, the keystone of traditional RL is to train an agent with large amounts of online exploration making lots of `errors' in the process. In the recommendation setting, though, we cannot afford the price of making `errors' online. As a result, the agent n…
Recommender systems learn from historical users' feedback that is often non-uniformly distributed across items. As a consequence, these systems may end up suggesting popular items more than niche items progressively, even when the latter would be of interest for users. This can hamper several core qualities of the recommended lists (e.g., novelty, coverage, diversity), impacting on the future success of the underlying platform itself. In this paper, we formalize two novel metrics that quantify how much a recommender system equally treats items along the popularity tail. The first one encourage…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Recently, deep learning has made significant progress in the task of sequential recommendation. Existing neural sequential recommenders typically adopt a generative way trained with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). When context information (called factor) is involved, it is difficult to analyze when and how each individual factor would affect the final recommendation performance. For this purpose, we take a new perspective and introduce adversarial learning to sequential recommendation. In this paper, we present a Multi-Factor Generative Adversarial Network (MFGAN) for explicitly modeling …
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Tencent Kandian Group（腾讯看点事业部）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Sequential recommender systems (SRS) have become a research hotspot due to its power in modeling user dynamic interests and sequential behavioral patterns. To maximize model expressive ability, a default choice is to apply a larger and deeper network architecture, which, however, often brings high network latency when generating online recommendations. Naturally, we argue that compressing the heavy recommendation models into middle- or light- weight neural networks is of great importance for practical production systems. To realize such a goal, we propose AdaRec, a knowledge distillation (KD) …
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Data61, CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61研究所）
A significant remaining challenge for existing recommender systems is that users may not trust the recommender systems for either lack of explanation or inaccurate recommendation results. Thus, it becomes critical to embrace a trustworthy recommender system. This survey provides a systemic summary of three categories of trust-aware recommender systems: social-aware recommender systems that leverage users' social relationships; robust recommender systems that filter untruthful noises (e.g., spammers and fake information) or enhance attack resistance; explainable recommender systems that provide…
Recommendation systems are recognised as being hugely important in industry, and the area is now well understood. At News UK, there is a requirement to be able to quickly generate recommendations for users on news items as they are published. However, little has been published about systems that can generate recommendations in response to changes in recommendable items and user behaviour in a very short space of time. In this paper we describe a new algorithm for updating collaborative filtering models incrementally, and demonstrate its effectiveness on clickstream data from The Times. We also…
Academic research in recommender systems has been greatly focusing on the accuracy-related measures of recommendations. Even when non-accuracy measures such as popularity bias, diversity, and novelty are studied, it is often solely from the users' perspective. However, many real-world recommenders are often multi-stakeholder environments in which the needs and interests of several stakeholders should be addressed in the recommendation process. In this paper, we focus on the popularity bias problem which is a well-known property of many recommendation algorithms where few popular items are over…
Researchers have begun to utilize heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs) as auxiliary information in recommendation systems to mitigate the cold start and sparsity issues. However, utilizing a graph neural network (GNN) to capture information in KG and further apply in RS is still problematic as it is unable to see each item's properties from multiple perspectives. To address these issues, we propose the multi-view item network (MVIN), a GNN-based recommendation model which provides superior recommendations by describing items from a unique mixed view from user and entity angles. MVIN learns ite…
Knowledge-Aware Multi-Intent Contrastive Learning for Multi-Behavior Recommendation
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yanshan University（燕山大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Xinjiang College Of Science & Technology（新疆科学技术学院信息科学与工程学院）
