Interaction-aware Factorization Machines for Recommender Systems
Advertising and Marketing Services, Corporate Development Group, Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司广告与营销服务部、企业发展集团）；zju.edu.cn（浙江大学（注：此为邮箱域名，非明确机构名，按要求不应提取，但原HTML中作者邮箱部分可能存在格式问题，根据提取范围，仅提取明确的机构名，此处原文本中唯一明确的机构是腾讯公司的部门，故仅保留该机构））
Factorization Machine (FM) is a widely used supervised learning approach by effectively modeling of feature interactions. Despite the successful application of FM and its many deep learning variants, treating every feature interaction fairly may degrade the performance. For example, the interactions of a useless feature may introduce noises; the importance of a feature may also differ when interacting with different features. In this work, we propose a novel model named \emph{Interaction-aware Factorization Machine} (IFM) by introducing Interaction-Aware Mechanism (IAM), which comprises the \emph{feature aspect} and the \emph{field aspect}, to learn flexible interactions on two levels. The feature aspect learns feature interaction importance via an attention network while the field aspect learns the feature interaction effect as a parametric similarity of the feature interaction vector and the corresponding field interaction prototype. IFM introduces more structured control and learns feature interaction importance in a stratified manner, which allows for more leverage in tweaking the interactions on both feature-wise and field-wise levels. Besides, we give a more generalized architecture and propose Interaction-aware Neural Network (INN) and DeepIFM to capture higher-order interactions. To further improve both the performance and efficiency of IFM, a sampling scheme is developed to select interactions based on the field aspect importance. The experimental results from two well-known datasets show the superiority of the proposed models over the state-of-the-art methods.
It is today accepted that matrix factorization models allow a high quality of rating prediction in recommender systems. However, a major drawback of matrix factorization is its static nature that results in a progressive declining of the accuracy of the predictions after each factorization. This is due to the fact that the new obtained ratings are not taken into account until a new factorization is computed, which can not be done very often because of the high cost of matrix factorization. In this paper, aiming at improving the accuracy of recommender systems, we propose a cluster-based matrix…
IRIT（图卢兹计算机科学研究所）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）
Count data are often used in recommender systems: they are widespread (song play counts, product purchases, clicks on web pages) and can reveal user preference without any explicit rating from the user. Such data are known to be sparse, over-dispersed and bursty, which makes their direct use in recommender systems challenging, often leading to pre-processing steps such as binarization. The aim of this paper is to build recommender systems from these raw data, by means of the recently proposed compound Poisson Factorization (cPF). The paper contributions are three-fold: we present a unified fra…
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…
We address the cold start problem in recommendation systems assuming no contextual information is available neither about users, nor items. We consider the case in which we only have access to a set of ratings of items by users. Most of the existing works consider a batch setting, and use cross-validation to tune parameters. The classical method consists in minimizing the root mean square error over a training subset of the ratings which provides a factorization of the matrix of ratings, interpreted as a latent representation of items and users. Our contribution in this paper is 5-fold. First,…
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a critical role in recommender systems and online advertising. The data used in these applications are multi-field categorical data, where each feature belongs to one field. Field information is proved to be important and there are several works considering fields in their models. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to model the field information effectively and efficiently. The proposed approach is a direct improvement of FwFM, and is named as Field-matrixed Factorization Machines (FmFM, or $FM^2$). We also proposed a new explanation of FM and…
Factorization machines (FMs) are a powerful tool for regression and classification in the context of sparse observations, that has been successfully applied to collaborative filtering, especially when side information over users or items is available. Bayesian formulations of FMs have been proposed to provide confidence intervals over the predictions made by the model, however they usually involve Markov-chain Monte Carlo methods that require many samples to provide accurate predictions, resulting in slow training in the context of large-scale data. In this paper, we propose a variational form…
Recommender systems are used in variety of domains affecting people's lives. This has raised concerns about possible biases and discrimination that such systems might exacerbate. There are two primary kinds of biases inherent in recommender systems: observation bias and bias stemming from imbalanced data. Observation bias exists due to a feedback loop which causes the model to learn to only predict recommendations similar to previous ones. Imbalance in data occurs when systematic societal, historical, or other ambient bias is present in the data. In this paper, we address both biases by propos…
Hashing-based Recommender Systems (RSs) are widely studied to provide scalable services. The existing methods for the systems combine three modules to achieve efficiency: feature extraction, interaction modeling, and binarization. In this paper, we study an unexplored module combination for the hashing-based recommender systems, namely Compact Cross-Similarity Recommender (CCSR). Inspired by cross-modal retrieval, CCSR utilizes Maximum a Posteriori similarity instead of matrix factorization and rating reconstruction to model interactions between users and items. We conducted experiments on Mov…
University of Qom（库姆大学）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
Considering processes of a business in a recommender system is highly advantageous. Although most studies in the business process analysis domain are of descriptive and predictive nature, the feasibility of constructing a process-aware recommender system is assessed in a few works. One reason can be the lack of knowledge on process mining potential for recommendation problems. Therefore, this paper aims to identify and analyze the published studies on process-aware recommender system techniques in business process management and process mining domain. A systematic review was conducted on 33 ac…
In this work a novel recommender system (RS) for Tourism is presented. The RS is context aware as is now the rule in the state-of-the-art for recommender systems and works on top of a tourism ontology which is used to group the different items being offered. The presented RS mixes different types of recommenders creating an ensemble which changes on the basis of the RS's maturity. Starting from simple content-based recommendations and iteratively adding popularity, demographic and collaborative filtering methods as rating density and user cardinality increases. The result is a RS that mutates …
Mila, Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学 Mila 研究院）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab Montreal Research Center（华为诺亚方舟实验室蒙特利尔研究中心）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
Given the convenience of collecting information through online services, recommender systems now consume large scale data and play a more important role in improving user experience. With the recent emergence of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), GNN-based recommender models have shown the advantage of modeling the recommender system as a user-item bipartite graph to learn representations of users and items. However, such models are expensive to train and difficult to perform frequent updates to provide the most up-to-date recommendations. In this work, we propose to update GNN-based recommender mo…
Recommender systems are considered one of the most rapidly growing branches of Artificial Intelligence. The demand for finding more efficient techniques to generate recommendations becomes urgent. However, many recommendations become useless if there is a delay in generating and showing them to the user. Therefore, we focus on improving the speed of recommendation systems without impacting the accuracy. In this paper, we suggest a novel recommender system based on Factorization Machines and Association Rules (FMAR). We introduce an approach to generate association rules using two algorithms: (…
The business objectives of recommenders, such as increasing sales, are aligned with the causal effect of recommendations. Previous recommenders targeting for the causal effect employ the inverse propensity scoring (IPS) in causal inference. However, IPS is prone to suffer from high variance. The matching estimator is another representative method in causal inference field. It does not use propensity and hence free from the above variance problem. In this work, we unify traditional neighborhood recommendation methods with the matching estimator, and develop robust ranking methods for the causal…
A context-aware recommender system (CARS) applies sensing and analysis of user context to provide personalized services. The contextual information can be driven from sensors in order to improve the accuracy of the recommendations. Yet, generating accurate recommendations is not enough to constitute a useful system from the users' perspective, since certain contextual information may cause different issues, such as draining the user's battery, privacy issues, and more. Adding high-dimensional contextual information may increase both the dimensionality and sparsity of the model. Previous studie…
Most existing recommender systems focus primarily on matching users to content which maximizes user satisfaction on the platform. It is increasingly obvious, however, that content providers have a critical influence on user satisfaction through content creation, largely determining the content pool available for recommendation. A natural question thus arises: can we design recommenders taking into account the long-term utility of both users and content providers? By doing so, we hope to sustain more providers and a more diverse content pool for long-term user satisfaction. Understanding the fu…
The ACM WSDM WebTour 2021 Challenge organized by Booking.com focuses on applying Session-Aware recommender systems in the travel domain. Given a sequence of travel bookings in a user trip, we look to recommend the user's next destination. To handle the large dimensionality of the output's space, we propose a many-to-many RNN model, predicting the next destination chosen by the user at every sequence step as opposed to only the final one. We show how this is a computationally efficient alternative to doing data augmentation in a many-to-one RNN, where we consider every subsequence of a session …
University of California, Berkeley（加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校）；Cornell Tech（康奈尔科技学院）；Technion（以色列理工学院）
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mediating our access to online information. We show that such algorithms induce a particular kind of stereotyping: if preferences for a set of items are anti-correlated in the general user population, then those items may not be recommended together to a user, regardless of that user's preferences and rating history. First, we introduce a notion of joint accessibility, which measures the extent to which a set of items can jointly be accessed by users. We then study joint accessibility under the standard factorization-based collaborative filtering fram…
Embedding is a useful technique to project a high-dimensional feature into a low-dimensional space, and it has many successful applications including link prediction, node classification and natural language processing. Current approaches mainly focus on static data, which usually lead to unsatisfactory performance in applications involving large changes over time. How to dynamically characterize the variation of the embedded features is still largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a dynamic variational embedding (DVE) approach for sequence-aware data based on recent advances in recur…
Snapchat, Inc.（Snapchat公司）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Borealis AI；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
Recommender systems can be formulated as a matrix completion problem, predicting ratings from user and item parameter vectors. Optimizing these parameters by subsampling data becomes difficult as the number of users and items grows. We develop a novel approach to generate all latent variables on demand from the ratings matrix itself and a fixed pool of parameters. We estimate missing ratings using chains of evidence that link them to a small set of prototypical users and items. Our model automatically addresses the cold-start and online learning problems by combining information across both us…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）；Institute of Numerical Mathematics Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院数值数学研究所）
A substantial progress in development of new and efficient tensor factorization techniques has led to an extensive research of their applicability in recommender systems field. Tensor-based recommender models push the boundaries of traditional collaborative filtering techniques by taking into account a multifaceted nature of real environments, which allows to produce more accurate, situational (e.g. context-aware, criteria-driven) recommendations. Despite the promising results, tensor-based methods are poorly covered in existing recommender systems surveys. This survey aims to complement previ…
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；Telekom Innovation Laboratories at BGU（BGU德国电信创新实验室）；Stern School of Business, New York University（纽约大学斯特恩商学院）
Context-aware recommender systems (CARSs) apply sensing and analysis of user context in order to provide personalized services. Adding context to a recommendation model is challenging, since the addition of context may increases both the dimensionality and sparsity of the model. Recent research has shown that modeling contextual information as a latent vector may address the sparsity and dimensionality challenges. We suggest a new latent modeling of sequential context by generating sequences of contextual information and reducing their contextual space to a compressed latent space.We train a l…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully adopted in recommender systems by virtue of the message-passing that implicitly captures collaborative effect. Nevertheless, most of the existing message-passing mechanisms for recommendation are directly inherited from GNNs without scrutinizing whether the captured collaborative effect would benefit the prediction of user preferences. In this paper, we first analyze how message-passing captures the collaborative effect and propose a recommendation-oriented topological metric, Common Interacted Ratio (CIR), which measures the level of interac…
Probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF) is a well-known model of recommender systems. With the development of image recognition technology, some PMF recommender systems that combine images have emerged. Some of these systems use the image shape features of the recommended products to achieve better results compared to those of the traditional PMF. However, in the existing methods, no PMF recommender system can combine the image features of products previously purchased by customers and of recommended products. Thus, this study proposes a novel probabilistic model that integrates double convol…
School of Computing, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学计算机学院）
The abundance of information in web applications make recommendation essential for users as well as applications. Despite the effectiveness of existing recommender systems, we find two major limitations that reduce their overall performance: (1) inability to provide timely recommendations for both new and existing users by considering the dynamic nature of user preferences, and (2) not fully optimized for the ranking task when using implicit feedback. Therefore, we propose a novel deep learning based unified cross-network solution to mitigate cold-start and data sparsity issues and provide tim…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
The latest advance in recommendation shows that better user and item representations can be learned via performing graph convolutions on the user-item interaction graph. However, such finding is mostly restricted to the collaborative filtering (CF) scenario, where the interaction contexts are not available. In this work, we extend the advantages of graph convolutions to context-aware recommender system (CARS, which represents a generic type of models that can handle various side information). We propose \textit{Graph Convolution Machine} (GCM), an end-to-end framework that consists of three co…
Matrix factorization is a popular method to build a recommender system. In such a system, existing users and items are associated to a low-dimension vector called a profile. The profiles of a user and of an item can be combined (via inner product) to predict the rating that the user would get on the item. One important issue of such a system is the so-called cold-start problem: how to allow a user to learn her profile, so that she can then get accurate recommendations? While a profile can be computed if the user is willing to rate well-chosen items and/or provide supplemental attributes or dem…
At the age of big data, recommender systems have shown remarkable success as a key means of information filtering in our daily life. Recent years have witnessed the technical development of recommender systems, from perception learning to cognition reasoning which intuitively build the task of recommendation as the procedure of logical reasoning and have achieve significant improvement. However, the logical statement in reasoning implicitly admits irrelevance of ordering, even does not consider time information which plays an important role in many recommendation tasks. Furthermore, recommenda…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Combinatorial features are essential for the success of many commercial models. Manually crafting these features usually comes with high cost due to the variety, volume and velocity of raw data in web-scale systems. Factorization based models, which measure interactions in terms of vector product, can learn patterns of combinatorial features automatically and generalize to unseen features as well. With the great success of deep neural networks (DNNs) in various fields, recently researchers have proposed several DNN-based factorization model to learn both low- and high-order feature interaction…
Amazon（亚马逊）；The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；École de Technologie Supérieure（高等技术学院）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
Collaborative recommendation approaches based on nearest-neighbors are still highly popular today due to their simplicity, their efficiency, and their ability to produce accurate and personalized recommendations. This chapter offers a comprehensive survey of neighborhood-based methods for the item recommendation problem. It presents the main characteristics and benefits of such methods, describes key design choices for implementing a neighborhood-based recommender system, and gives practical information on how to make these choices. A broad range of methods is covered in the chapter, including…
Intuit AI（Intuit人工智能）；Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Facebook（脸书）；University of Klagenfurt（克拉根福大学）
Due to the advances in deep learning, visually-aware recommender systems (RS) have recently attracted increased research interest. Such systems combine collaborative signals with images, usually represented as feature vectors outputted by pre-trained image models. Since item catalogs can be huge, recommendation service providers often rely on images that are supplied by the item providers. In this work, we show that relying on such external sources can make an RS vulnerable to attacks, where the goal of the attacker is to unfairly promote certain pushed items. Specifically, we demonstrate how …
Factorization Machines (FM) are only used in a narrow range of applications and are not part of the standard toolbox of machine learning models. This is a pity, because even though FMs are recognized as being very successful for recommender system type applications they are a general model to deal with sparse and high dimensional features. Our Factorization Machine implementation provides easy access to many solvers and supports regression, classification and ranking tasks. Such an implementation simplifies the use of FM's for a wide field of applications. This implementation has the potential…
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）
This paper studies user attributes in light of current concerns in the recommender system community: diversity, coverage, calibration, and data minimization. In experiments with a conventional context-aware recommender system that leverages side information, we show that user attributes do not always improve recommendation. Then, we demonstrate that user attributes can negatively impact diversity and coverage. Finally, we investigate the amount of information about users that ``survives'' from the training data into the recommendation lists produced by the recommender. This information is a we…
Massachussetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）
We present a machine learning algorithm for building classifiers that are comprised of a small number of disjunctions of conjunctions (or's of and's). An example of a classifier of this form is as follows: If X satisfies (x1 = 'blue' AND x3 = 'middle') OR (x1 = 'blue' AND x2 = '<15') OR (x1 = 'yellow'), then we predict that Y=1, ELSE predict Y=0. An attribute-value pair is called a literal and a conjunction of literals is called a pattern. Models of this form have the advantage of being interpretable to human experts, since they produce a set of conditions that concisely describe a specific cl…
School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College（都柏林圣三一学院计算机科学与统计学院）
We propose a privacy-enhanced matrix factorization recommender that exploits the fact that users can often be grouped together by interest. This allows a form of "hiding in the crowd" privacy. We introduce a novel matrix factorization approach suited to making recommendations in a shared group (or nym) setting and the BLC algorithm for carrying out this matrix factorization in a privacy-enhanced manner. We demonstrate that the increased privacy does not come at the cost of reduced recommendation accuracy.
IRIT, Université de Toulouse, CNRS（图卢兹大学 IRIT 研究所、法国国家科学研究中心）
We introduce negative binomial matrix factorization (NBMF), a matrix factorization technique specially designed for analyzing over-dispersed count data. It can be viewed as an extension of Poisson matrix factorization (PF) perturbed by a multiplicative term which models exposure. This term brings a degree of freedom for controlling the dispersion, making NBMF more robust to outliers. We show that NBMF allows to skip traditional pre-processing stages, such as binarization, which lead to loss of information. Two estimation approaches are presented: maximum likelihood and variational Bayes infere…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Many businesses are using recommender systems for marketing outreach. Recommendation algorithms can be either based on content or driven by collaborative filtering. We study different ways to incorporate content information directly into the matrix factorization approach of collaborative filtering. These content-boosted matrix factorization algorithms not only improve recommendation accuracy, but also provide useful insights about the contents, as well as make recommendations more easily interpretable.
Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) have gained increasing attention due to their ability to utilize contextual information. Compared to traditional recommender systems, CARS are, in general, able to generate more accurate recommendations. Latent factors approach accounts for a large proportion of CARS. Recently, a non-linear Gaussian Process (GP) based factorization method was proven to outperform the state-of-the-art methods in CARS. Despite its effectiveness, GP model-based methods can suffer from over-fitting and may not be able to determine the impact of each context automatically. I…
Beyond accuracy, quality measures are gaining importance in modern recommender systems, with reliability being one of the most important indicators in the context of collaborative filtering. This paper proposes Bernoulli Matrix Factorization (BeMF), which is a matrix factorization model, to provide both prediction values and reliability values. BeMF is a very innovative approach from several perspectives: a) it acts on model-based collaborative filtering rather than on memory-based filtering, b) it does not use external methods or extended architectures, such as existing solutions, to provide …
University of Hyderabad（海得拉巴大学）；Central University of Rajasthan（拉贾斯坦中央大学）
With the abundance of data in recent years, interesting challenges are posed in the area of recommender systems. Producing high quality recommendations with scalability and performance is the need of the hour. Singular Value Decomposition(SVD) based recommendation algorithms have been leveraged to produce better results. In this paper, we extend the SVD technique further for scalability and performance in the context of 1) multi-threading 2) multiple computational units (with the use of Graphical Processing Units) and 3) distributed computation. We propose block based matrix factorization (BMF…
Does Weighting Improve Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems?
University of Alberta Edmonton, AB Canada；Netflix, Inc. Los Gatos, CA USA；Netflix, Inc. \& Cornell University New York, NY USA；University of Alberta；Netflix, Inc.；Netflix, Inc. \& Cornell University
Regularization is a popular technique to solve the overfitting problem of machine learning algorithms. Most regularization technique relies on parameter selection of the regularization coefficient. Plug-in method and cross-validation approach are two most common parameter selection approaches for regression methods such as Ridge Regression, Lasso Regression and Kernel Regression. Matrix factorization based recommendation system also has heavy reliance on the regularization technique. Most people select a single scalar value to regularize the user feature vector and item feature vector independ…
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) provide a principled online learning approach to attain the balance between exploration and exploitation. Due to the superior performance and low feedback learning without the learning to act in multiple situations, Multi-armed Bandits drawing widespread attention in applications ranging such as recommender systems. Likewise, within the recommender system, collaborative filtering (CF) is arguably the earliest and most influential method in the recommender system. Crucially, new users and an ever-changing pool of recommended items are the challenges that recommender sy…
Real-world item recommenders commonly suffer from a persistent cold-start problem which is caused by dynamically changing users and items. In order to overcome the problem, several context-aware recommendation techniques have been recently proposed. In terms of both feasibility and performance, factorization machine (FM) is one of the most promising methods as generalization of the conventional matrix factorization techniques. However, since online algorithms are suitable for dynamic data, the static FMs are still inadequate. Thus, this paper proposes incremental FMs (iFMs), a general online f…
ContentWise（ContentWise公司）；Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）
Proposed in 2014, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) initiated a fresh interest in generative modelling. They immediately achieved state-of-the-art in image synthesis, image-to-image translation, text-to-image generation, image inpainting and have been used in sciences ranging from medicine to high-energy particle physics. Despite their popularity and ability to learn arbitrary distributions, GAN have not been widely applied in recommender systems (RS). Moreover, only few of the techniques that have introduced GAN in RS have employed them directly as a collaborative filtering (CF) model. In…
Joint analysis of data from multiple information repositories facilitates uncovering the underlying structure in heterogeneous datasets. Single and coupled matrix-tensor factorization (CMTF) has been widely used in this context for imputation-based recommendation from ratings, social network, and other user-item data. When this side information is in the form of item-item correlation matrices or graphs, existing CMTF algorithms may fall short. Alleviating current limitations, we introduce a novel model coined coupled graph-tensor factorization (CGTF) that judiciously accounts for graph-related…
