This paper proposes a recommender system to alleviate the cold-start problem that can estimate user preferences based on only a small number of items. To identify a user's preference in the cold state, existing recommender systems, such as Netflix, initially provide items to a user; we call those items evidence candidates. Recommendations are then made based on the items selected by the user. Previous recommendation studies have two limitations: (1) the users who consumed a few items have poor recommendations and (2) inadequate evidence candidates are used to identify user preferences. We propose a meta-learning-based recommender system called MeLU to overcome these two limitations. From meta-learning, which can rapidly adopt new task with a few examples, MeLU can estimate new user's preferences with a few consumed items. In addition, we provide an evidence candidate selection strategy that determines distinguishing items for customized preference estimation. We validate MeLU with two benchmark datasets, and the proposed model reduces at least 5.92% mean absolute error than two comparative models on the datasets. We also conduct a user study experiment to verify the evidence selection strategy.
The Home Depot（家得宝）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) have shown superior performance over conventional methods. However, they show limited scalability on large-scale industrial datasets since most models learn one embedding per item. This leads to a large memory requirement (of storing one vector per item) and poor performance on sparse sessions with cold-start or unpopular items. Using one public and one large industrial dataset, we experimentally show that state-of-the-art SBRSs have low performance on sparse sessions with sparse items. We propose M2TRec, a Metadata-aware Multi-task Transformer model f…
We present a novel dynamic recommendation model that focuses on users who have interactions in the past but turn relatively inactive recently. Making effective recommendations to these time-sensitive cold-start users is critical to maintain the user base of a recommender system. Due to the sparse recent interactions, it is challenging to capture these users' current preferences precisely. Solely relying on their historical interactions may also lead to outdated recommendations misaligned with their recent interests. The proposed model leverages historical and current user-item interactions and…
University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Data 61, CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61分部）
A common challenge for most current recommender systems is the cold-start problem. Due to the lack of user-item interactions, the fine-tuned recommender systems are unable to handle situations with new users or new items. Recently, some works introduce the meta-optimization idea into the recommendation scenarios, i.e. predicting the user preference by only a few of past interacted items. The core idea is learning a global sharing initialization parameter for all users and then learning the local parameters for each user separately. However, most meta-learning based recommendation approaches ad…
Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Tencent（腾讯）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Xiamen Data Intelligence Academy of ICT, CAS（中国科学院信息工程研究所厦门数据智能研究院）
Cold-start problems are enormous challenges in practical recommender systems. One promising solution for this problem is cross-domain recommendation (CDR) which leverages rich information from an auxiliary (source) domain to improve the performance of recommender system in the target domain. In these CDR approaches, the family of Embedding and Mapping methods for CDR (EMCDR) is very effective, which explicitly learn a mapping function from source embeddings to target embeddings with overlapping users. However, these approaches suffer from one serious problem: the mapping function is only learn…
Practical recommender systems experience a cold-start problem when observed user-item interactions in the history are insufficient. Meta learning, especially gradient based one, can be adopted to tackle this problem by learning initial parameters of the model and thus allowing fast adaptation to a specific task from limited data examples. Though with significant performance improvement, it commonly suffers from two critical issues: the non-compatibility with mainstream industrial deployment and the heavy computational burdens, both due to the inner-loop gradient operation. These two issues mak…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
A common challenge in personalized user preference prediction is the cold-start problem. Due to the lack of user-item interactions, directly learning from the new users' log data causes serious over-fitting problem. Recently, many existing studies regard the cold-start personalized preference prediction as a few-shot learning problem, where each user is the task and recommended items are the classes, and the gradient-based meta learning method (MAML) is leveraged to address this challenge. However, in real-world application, the users are not uniformly distributed (i.e., different users may ha…
Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown great promise in the field of automated machine learning (AutoML). NAS has outperformed hand-designed networks and made a significant step forward in the field of automating the design of deep neural networks, thus further reducing the need for human expertise. However, most research is done targeting a single specific task, leaving research of NAS methods over multiple tasks mostly overlooked. Generally, there exist two popular ways to find an architecture for some novel task. Either searching from scratch, which is ineffective by design, or transfer…
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）
Meta-learning algorithms can accelerate the model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms by finding an initial set of parameters for the dynamical model such that the model can be trained to match the actual dynamics of the system with only a few data-points. However, in the real world, a robot might encounter any situation starting from motor failures to finding itself in a rocky terrain where the dynamics of the robot can be significantly different from one another. In this paper, first, we show that when meta-training situations (the prior situations) have such diverse dynamics, usi…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；IIIS, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息研究院）
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction has been one of the most central problems in computational advertising. Lately, embedding techniques that produce low-dimensional representations of ad IDs drastically improve CTR prediction accuracies. However, such learning techniques are data demanding and work poorly on new ads with little logging data, which is known as the cold-start problem. In this paper, we aim to improve CTR predictions during both the cold-start phase and the warm-up phase when a new ad is added to the candidate pool. We propose Meta-Embedding, a meta-learning-based approach that …
Cold-start problems are long-standing challenges for practical recommendations. Most existing recommendation algorithms rely on extensive observed data and are brittle to recommendation scenarios with few interactions. This paper addresses such problems using few-shot learning and meta learning. Our approach is based on the insight that having a good generalization from a few examples relies on both a generic model initialization and an effective strategy for adapting this model to newly arising tasks. To accomplish this, we combine the scenario-specific learning with a model-agnostic sequenti…
Mila；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；École Polytechnique de Montréal（蒙特利尔高等理工学院）；ElementAI
In this work we study generalization of neural networks in gradient-based meta-learning by analyzing various properties of the objective landscapes. We experimentally demonstrate that as meta-training progresses, the meta-test solutions, obtained after adapting the meta-train solution of the model, to new tasks via few steps of gradient-based fine-tuning, become flatter, lower in loss, and further away from the meta-train solution. We also show that those meta-test solutions become flatter even as generalization starts to degrade, thus providing an experimental evidence against the correlation…
University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Clarifai（克拉里菲人工智能公司）
Transfer-learning and meta-learning are two effective methods to apply knowledge learned from large data sources to new tasks. In few-class, few-shot target task settings (i.e. when there are only a few classes and training examples available in the target task), meta-learning approaches that optimize for future task learning have outperformed the typical transfer approach of initializing model weights from a pre-trained starting point. But as we experimentally show, meta-learning algorithms that work well in the few-class setting do not generalize well in many-shot and many-class cases. In th…
A knowledge graph (KG) consists of a set of interconnected typed entities and their attributes. Recently, KGs are popularly used as the auxiliary information to enable more accurate, explainable, and diverse user preference recommendations. Specifically, existing KG-based recommendation methods target modeling high-order relations/dependencies from long connectivity user-item interactions hidden in KG. However, most of them ignore the cold-start problems (i.e., user cold-start and item cold-start) of recommendation analytics, which restricts their performance in scenarios when involving new us…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
The cold-start recommendation is an urgent problem in contemporary online applications. It aims to provide users whose behaviors are literally sparse with as accurate recommendations as possible. Many data-driven algorithms, such as the widely used matrix factorization, underperform because of data sparseness. This work adopts the idea of meta-learning to solve the user's cold-start recommendation problem. We propose a meta-learning based cold-start sequential recommendation framework called metaCSR, including three main components: Diffusion Representer for learning better user/item embedding…
A proper form of data characterization can guide the process of learning-algorithm selection and model-performance estimation. The field of meta-learning has provided a rich body of work describing effective forms of data characterization using different families of meta-features (statistical, model-based, information-theoretic, topological, etc.). In this paper, we start with the abundant set of existing meta-features and propose a method to induce new abstract meta-features as latent variables in a deep neural network. We discuss the pitfalls of using traditional meta-features directly and a…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Institute of Automation and Artificial Intelligence Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化与人工智能研究院）
This paper explores meta-learning in sequential recommendation to alleviate the item cold-start problem. Sequential recommendation aims to capture user's dynamic preferences based on historical behavior sequences and acts as a key component of most online recommendation scenarios. However, most previous methods have trouble recommending cold-start items, which are prevalent in those scenarios. As there is generally no side information in the setting of sequential recommendation task, previous cold-start methods could not be applied when only user-item interactions are available. Thus, we propo…
A fundamental challenge for sequential recommenders is to capture the sequential patterns of users toward modeling how users transit among items. In many practical scenarios, however, there are a great number of cold-start users with only minimal logged interactions. As a result, existing sequential recommendation models will lose their predictive power due to the difficulties in learning sequential patterns over users with only limited interactions. In this work, we aim to improve sequential recommendation for cold-start users with a novel framework named MetaTL, which learns to model the tra…
University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）；Samsung Research America（三星美国研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise in optimizing long-term user interest in recommender systems. However, existing RL-based recommendation methods need a large number of interactions for each user to learn a robust recommendation policy. The challenge becomes more critical when recommending to new users who have a limited number of interactions. To that end, in this paper, we address the cold-start challenge in the RL-based recommender systems by proposing a meta-level model-based reinforcement learning approach for fast user adaptation. In our approach, we learn to infer each…
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；JD.COM Silicon Valley R&D Center（京东硅谷研发中心）
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) explicitly solicit users' preferences for improved recommendations on the fly. Most existing CRS solutions count on a single policy trained by reinforcement learning for a population of users. However, for users new to the system, such a global policy becomes ineffective to satisfy them, i.e., the cold-start challenge. In this paper, we study CRS policy learning for cold-start users via meta-reinforcement learning. We propose to learn a meta policy and adapt it to new users with only a few trials of conversational recommendations. To facilitate fast pol…
I present a hybrid matrix factorisation model representing users and items as linear combinations of their content features' latent factors. The model outperforms both collaborative and content-based models in cold-start or sparse interaction data scenarios (using both user and item metadata), and performs at least as well as a pure collaborative matrix factorisation model where interaction data is abundant. Additionally, feature embeddings produced by the model encode semantic information in a way reminiscent of word embedding approaches, making them useful for a range of related tasks such a…
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is one of the most central tasks in online advertising systems. Recent deep learning-based models that exploit feature embedding and high-order data nonlinearity have shown dramatic successes in CTR prediction. However, these models work poorly on cold-start ads with new IDs, whose embeddings are not well learned yet. In this paper, we propose Graph Meta Embedding (GME) models that can rapidly learn how to generate desirable initial embeddings for new ad IDs based on graph neural networks and meta learning. Previous works address this problem from the new ad…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学澳大利亚人工智能研究所）；Intelligent Terminal Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province（四川省智能终端重点实验室）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）
Cold-start issues have been more and more challenging for providing accurate recommendations with the fast increase of users and items. Most existing approaches attempt to solve the intractable problems via content-aware recommendations based on auxiliary information and/or cross-domain recommendations with transfer learning. Their performances are often constrained by the extremely sparse user-item interactions, unavailable side information, or very limited domain-shared users. Recently, meta-learners with meta-augmentation by adding noises to labels have been proven to be effective to avoid …
Recently, embedding techniques have achieved impressive success in recommender systems. However, the embedding techniques are data demanding and suffer from the cold-start problem. Especially, for the cold-start item which only has limited interactions, it is hard to train a reasonable item ID embedding, called cold ID embedding, which is a major challenge for the embedding techniques. The cold item ID embedding has two main problems: (1) A gap is existing between the cold ID embedding and the deep model. (2) Cold ID embedding would be seriously affected by noisy interaction. However, most exi…
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
In recommender systems, one common challenge is the cold-start problem, where interactions are very limited for fresh users in the systems. To address this challenge, recently, many works introduce the meta-optimization idea into the recommendation scenarios, i.e. learning to learn the user preference by only a few past interaction items. The core idea is to learn global shared meta-initialization parameters for all users and rapidly adapt them into local parameters for each user respectively. They aim at deriving general knowledge across preference learning of various users, so as to rapidly …
User cold-start recommendation is a long-standing challenge for recommender systems due to the fact that only a few interactions of cold-start users can be exploited. Recent studies seek to address this challenge from the perspective of meta learning, and most of them follow a manner of parameter initialization, where the model parameters can be learned by a few steps of gradient updates. While these gradient-based meta-learning models achieve promising performances to some extent, a fundamental problem of them is how to adapt the global knowledge learned from previous tasks for the recommenda…
Online video services acquire new content on a daily basis to increase engagement, and improve the user experience. Traditional recommender systems solely rely on watch history, delaying the recommendation of newly added titles to the right customer. However, one can use the metadata information of a cold-start title to bootstrap the personalization. In this work, we propose to adopt a two-tower model, in which one tower is to learn the user representation based on their watch history, and the other tower is to learn the effective representations for titles using metadata. The contribution of …
Key Lab of Intelligent Information Processing of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院智能信息处理重点实验室，中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学人工智能研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；WeChat Search Application Department, Tencent（腾讯微信搜索应用部）；SKLSDE, School of Computer Science, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学计算机学院软件开发环境国家重点实验室）
Cold-start problem is still a very challenging problem in recommender systems. Fortunately, the interactions of the cold-start users in the auxiliary source domain can help cold-start recommendations in the target domain. How to transfer user's preferences from the source domain to the target domain, is the key issue in Cross-domain Recommendation (CDR) which is a promising solution to deal with the cold-start problem. Most existing methods model a common preference bridge to transfer preferences for all users. Intuitively, since preferences vary from user to user, the preference bridges of di…
Deep neural network based recommendation systems have achieved great success as information filtering techniques in recent years. However, since model training from scratch requires sufficient data, deep learning-based recommendation methods still face the bottlenecks of insufficient data and computational inefficiency. Meta-learning, as an emerging paradigm that learns to improve the learning efficiency and generalization ability of algorithms, has shown its strength in tackling the data sparsity issue. Recently, a growing number of studies on deep meta-learning based recommenddation systems …
Recommender Systems (RS) have became a popular research topic and, since 2016, Deep Learning methods and techniques have been increasingly explored in this area. News RS are aimed to personalize users experiences and help them discover relevant articles from a large and dynamic search space. The main contribution of this research was named CHAMELEON, a Deep Learning meta-architecture designed to tackle the specific challenges of news recommendation. It consists of a modular reference architecture which can be instantiated using different neural building blocks. As information about users' past…
Cold-start problem is a fundamental challenge for recommendation tasks. Despite the recent advances on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) incorporate the high-order collaborative signal to alleviate the problem, the embeddings of the cold-start users and items aren't explicitly optimized, and the cold-start neighbors are not dealt with during the graph convolution in GNNs. This paper proposes to pre-train a GNN model before applying it for recommendation. Unlike the goal of recommendation, the pre-training GNN simulates the cold-start scenarios from the users/items with sufficient interactions and t…
Internet insurance products are apparently different from traditional e-commerce goods for their complexity, low purchasing frequency, etc.So, cold start problem is even worse. In traditional e-commerce field, several cross-domain recommendation (CDR) methods have been studied to infer preferences of cold start users based on their preferences in other domains. However, these CDR methods could not be applied into insurance domain directly due to product complexity. In this paper, we propose a Deep Cross Domain Insurance Recommendation System (DCDIR) for cold start users. Specifically, we first…
