Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation aims to offer suggestions on which POI to visit next, given a user's POI visit history. This problem has a wide application in the tourism industry, and it is gaining an increasing interest as more POI check-in data become available. The problem is often modeled as a sequential recommendation problem to take advantage of the sequential patterns of user check-ins, e.g., people tend to visit Central Park after The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Recently, self-attentive networks have been shown to be both effective and efficient in general sequential recommendation problems, e.g., to recommend products, video games, or movies. Directly adopting self-attentive networks for next POI recommendation, however, may produce sub-optimal recommendations. This is because vanilla self-attentive networks do not consider the spatial and temporal patterns of user check-ins, which are two critical features in next POI recommendation. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose a model named SANST that incorporates spatio-temporal patterns of user check-ins into self-attentive networks. To incorporate the spatial patterns, we encode the relative positions of POIs into their embeddings before feeding the embeddings into the self-attentive network. To incorporate the temporal patterns, we discretize the time of POI check-ins and model the temporal relationship between POI check-ins by a relation-aware self-attention module. We evaluate the performance of our SANST model with three real-world datasets. The results show that SANST consistently outperforms the state-of-theart models, and the advantage in nDCG@10 is up to 13.65%.
With the growing importance of personalized recommendation, numerous recommendation models have been proposed recently. Among them, Matrix Factorization (MF) based models are the most widely used in the recommendation field due to their high performance. However, MF based models suffer from cold start problems where user-item interactions are sparse. To deal with this problem, content based recommendation models which use the auxiliary attributes of users and items have been proposed. Since these models use auxiliary attributes, they are effective in cold start settings. However, most of the p…
Factorization methods for recommender systems tend to represent users as a single latent vector. However, user behavior and interests may change in the context of the recommendations that are presented to the user. For example, in the case of movie recommendations, it is usually true that earlier user data is less informative than more recent data. However, it is possible that a certain early movie may become suddenly more relevant in the presence of a popular sequel movie. This is just a single example of a variety of possible dynamically altering user interests in the presence of a potential…
Knowledge graphs (KGs) have proven to be effective for high-quality recommendation, where the connectivities between users and items provide rich and complementary information to user-item interactions. Most existing methods, however, are insufficient to exploit the KGs for capturing user preferences, as they either represent the user-item connectivities via paths with limited expressiveness or implicitly model them by propagating information over the entire KG with inevitable noise. In this paper, we design a novel hierarchical attentive knowledge graph embedding (HAKG) framework to exploit t…
A transaction-based recommender system (TBRS) aims to predict the next item by modeling dependencies in transactional data. Generally, two kinds of dependencies considered are intra-transaction dependency and inter-transaction dependency. Most existing TBRSs recommend next item by only modeling the intra-transaction dependency within the current transaction while ignoring inter-transaction dependency with recent transactions that may also affect the next item. However, as not all recent transactions are relevant to the current and next items, the relevant ones should be identified and prioriti…
An important problem in multiview representation learning is finding the optimal combination of views with respect to the specific task at hand. To this end, we introduce NAM: a Neural Attentive Multiview machine that learns multiview item representations and similarity by employing a novel attention mechanism. NAM harnesses multiple information sources and automatically quantifies their relevancy with respect to a supervised task. Finally, a very practical advantage of NAM is its robustness to the case of dataset with missing views. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NAM for the task of movi…
Two main challenges in recommender systems are modeling users with heterogeneous taste, and providing explainable recommendations. In this paper, we propose the neural Attentive Multi-Persona Collaborative Filtering (AMP-CF) model as a unified solution for both problems. AMP-CF breaks down the user to several latent 'personas' (profiles) that identify and discern the different tastes and inclinations of the user. Then, the revealed personas are used to generate and explain the final recommendation list for the user. AMP-CF models users as an attentive mixture of personas, enabling a dynamic us…
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机学院）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学电子、电气工程与计算机科学学院）
In this paper, we develop a neural attentive interpretable recommendation system, named NAIRS. A self-attention network, as a key component of the system, is designed to assign attention weights to interacted items of a user. This attention mechanism can distinguish the importance of the various interacted items in contributing to a user profile. Based on the user profiles obtained by the self-attention network, NAIRS offers personalized high-quality recommendation. Moreover, it develops visual cues to interpret recommendations. This demo application with the implementation of NAIRS enables us…
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）；RealAI；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Session-based recommendation nowadays plays a vital role in many websites, which aims to predict users' actions based on anonymous sessions. There have emerged many studies that model a session as a sequence or a graph via investigating temporal transitions of items in a session. However, these methods compress a session into one fixed representation vector without considering the target items to be predicted. The fixed vector will restrict the representation ability of the recommender model, considering the diversity of target items and users' interests. In this paper, we propose a novel targ…
Sequential recommendation systems model dynamic preferences of users based on their historical interactions with platforms. Despite recent progress, modeling short-term and long-term behavior of users in such systems is nontrivial and challenging. To address this, we present a solution enhanced by a knowledge graph called KATRec (Knowledge Aware aTtentive sequential Recommendations). KATRec learns the short and long-term interests of users by modeling their sequence of interacted items and leveraging pre-existing side information through a knowledge graph attention network. Our novel knowledge…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Personalized news recommendation is very important for online news platforms to help users find interested news and improve user experience. News and user representation learning is critical for news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually learn these representations based on single news information, e.g., title, which may be insufficient. In this paper we propose a neural news recommendation approach which can learn informative representations of users and news by exploiting different kinds of news information. The core of our approach is a news encoder and a user encoder…
Frequent group activities of human beings have become an indispensable part in their daily life. Group recommendation can recommend satisfactory activities to group members in the recommender systems, and the key issue is how to aggregate preferences in different group members. Most existing group recommendation employed the predefined static aggregation strategies to aggregate the preferences of different group members, but these static strategies cannot simulate the dynamic group decision-making. Meanwhile, most of these methods depend on intuitions or assumptions to analyze the influence of…
Sequential recommendation aims to recommend the next item of users' interest based on their historical interactions. Recently, the self-attention mechanism has been adapted for sequential recommendation, and demonstrated state-of-the-art performance. However, in this manuscript, we show that the self-attention-based sequential recommendation methods could suffer from the localization-deficit issue. As a consequence, in these methods, over the first few blocks, the item representations may quickly diverge from their original representations, and thus, impairs the learning in the following block…
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 …
Sequential Recommendation is a prominent topic in current research, which uses user behavior sequence as an input to predict future behavior. By assessing the correlation strength of historical behavior through the dot product, the model based on the self-attention mechanism can capture the long-term preference of the sequence. However, it has two limitations. On the one hand, it does not effectively utilize the items' local context information when determining the attention and creating the sequence representation. On the other hand, the convolution and linear layers often contain redundant i…
Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) have greatly facilitated the development of sequential recommender systems by achieving state-of-the-art recommendation performance on various sequential recommendation tasks. Given a sequence of interacted items, existing DNN-based sequential recommenders commonly embed each item into a unique vector to support subsequent computations of the user interest. However, due to the potentially large number of items, the over-parameterised item embedding matrix of a sequential recommender has become a memory bottleneck for efficient deployment in resource-constrain…
Self-attention based models are widely used in news recommendation tasks. However, previous Attention architecture does not constrain repeated information in the user's historical behavior, which limits the power of hidden representation and leads to some problems such as information redundancy and filter bubbles. To solve this problem, we propose a personalized news recommendation model called DCAN.It captures multi-grained user-news matching signals through news encoders and user encoders. We keep updating a coverage vector to track the history of news attention and augment the vector in 4 t…
Given e-commerce scenarios that user profiles are invisible, session-based recommendation is proposed to generate recommendation results from short sessions. Previous work only considers the user's sequential behavior in the current session, whereas the user's main purpose in the current session is not emphasized. In this paper, we propose a novel neural networks framework, i.e., Neural Attentive Recommendation Machine (NARM), to tackle this problem. Specifically, we explore a hybrid encoder with an attention mechanism to model the user's sequential behavior and capture the user's main purpose…
Industrial recommender systems usually employ multi-source data to improve the recommendation quality, while effectively sharing information between different data sources remain a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel Multi-View Approach with Hybrid Attentive Networks (MV-HAN) for contents retrieval at the matching stage of recommender systems. The proposed model enables high-order feature interaction from various input features while effectively transferring knowledge between different types. By employing a well-placed parameters sharing strategy, the MV-HAN substantially improves t…
In recent years, many studies extract aspects from user reviews and integrate them with ratings for improving the recommendation performance. The common aspects mentioned in a user's reviews and a product's reviews indicate indirect connections between the user and product. However, these aspect-based methods suffer from two problems. First, the common aspects are usually very sparse, which is caused by the sparsity of user-product interactions and the diversity of individual users' vocabularies. Second, a user's interests on aspects could be different with respect to different products, which…
Sequential recommendation (SR) is to accurately recommend a list of items for a user based on her current accessed ones. While new-coming users continuously arrive in the real world, one crucial task is to have inductive SR that can produce embeddings of users and items without re-training. Given user-item interactions can be extremely sparse, another critical task is to have transferable SR that can transfer the knowledge derived from one domain with rich data to another domain. In this work, we aim to present the holistic SR that simultaneously accommodates conventional, inductive, and trans…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
To alleviate data sparsity and cold-start problems of traditional recommender systems (RSs), incorporating knowledge graphs (KGs) to supplement auxiliary information has attracted considerable attention recently. However, simply integrating KGs in current KG-based RS models is not necessarily a guarantee to improve the recommendation performance, which may even weaken the holistic model capability. This is because the construction of these KGs is independent of the collection of historical user-item interactions; hence, information in these KGs may not always be helpful for recommendation to a…
Interpretation of retrieved results is an important issue in music recommender systems, particularly from a user perspective. In this study, we investigate the methods for providing interpretability of content features using self-attention. We extract lyric features with the self-attentive genre classification model trained on 140,000 tracks of lyrics. Likewise, we extract acoustic features using the acoustic model with self-attention trained on 120,000 tracks of acoustic signals. The experimental results show that the proposed methods provide the characteristics that are interpretable in term…
Transformer-based sequential recommenders are very powerful for capturing both short-term and long-term sequential item dependencies. This is mainly attributed to their unique self-attention networks to exploit pairwise item-item interactions within the sequence. However, real-world item sequences are often noisy, which is particularly true for implicit feedback. For example, a large portion of clicks do not align well with user preferences, and many products end up with negative reviews or being returned. As such, the current user action only depends on a subset of items, not on the entire se…
The rapid growth of Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) provides a great opportunity to satisfy the strong demand for personalized Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation services. However, with the tremendous increase of users and POIs, POI recommender systems still face several challenging problems: (1) the hardness of modeling non-linear user-POI interactions from implicit feedback; (2) the difficulty of incorporating context information such as POIs' geographical coordinates. To cope with these challenges, we propose a novel autoencoder-based model to learn the non-linear user-POI relati…
Next (or successive) point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Most of the previous studies attempted to incorporate the spatiotemporal information and sequential patterns of user check-ins into recommendation models to predict the target user's next move. However, none of these approaches utilized the social influence of each user's friends. In this study, we discuss a new topic of next POI recommendation and present a deep attentive network for social-aware next POI recommendation called DAN-SNR. In particular, the DAN-SNR makes use of the sel…
Recommender systems today have become an essential component of any commercial website. Collaborative filtering approaches, and Matrix Factorization (MF) techniques in particular, are widely used in recommender systems. However, the natural data sparsity problem limits their performance where users generally interact with very few items in the system. Consequently, multiple hybrid models were proposed recently to optimize MF performance by incorporating additional contextual information in its learning process. Although these models improve the recommendation quality, there are two primary asp…
The rapid growth of Internet services and mobile devices provides an excellent opportunity to satisfy the strong demand for the personalized item or product recommendation. However, with the tremendous increase of users and items, personalized recommender systems still face several challenging problems: (1) the hardness of exploiting sparse implicit feedback; (2) the difficulty of combining heterogeneous data. To cope with these challenges, we propose a gated attentive-autoencoder (GATE) model, which is capable of learning fused hidden representations of items' contents and binary ratings, thr…
User and item reviews are valuable for the construction of recommender systems. In general, existing review-based methods for recommendation can be broadly categorized into two groups: the siamese models that build static user and item representations from their reviews respectively, and the interaction-based models that encode user and item dynamically according to the similarity or relationships of their reviews. Although the interaction-based models have more model capacity and fit human purchasing behavior better, several problematic model designs and assumptions of the existing interactio…
Recommender Systems are an integral part of music sharing platforms. Often the aim of these systems is to increase the time, the user spends on the platform and hence having a high commercial value. The systems which aim at increasing the average time a user spends on the platform often need to recommend songs which the user might want to listen to next at each point in time. This is different from recommendation systems which try to predict the item which might be of interest to the user at some point in the user lifetime but not necessarily in the very near future. Prediction of the next son…
Recently, recommender systems have been able to emit substantially improved recommendations by leveraging user-provided reviews. Existing methods typically merge all reviews of a given user or item into a long document, and then process user and item documents in the same manner. In practice, however, these two sets of reviews are notably different: users' reviews reflect a variety of items that they have bought and are hence very heterogeneous in their topics, while an item's reviews pertain only to that single item and are thus topically homogeneous. In this work, we develop a novel neural n…
Using reviews to learn user and item representations is important for recommender system. Current review based methods can be divided into two categories: (1) the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based models that extract n-gram features from user/item reviews; (2) the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based models that learn global contextual representations from reviews for users and items. Despite their success, both CNN and RNN based models in previous studies suffer from their own drawbacks. While CNN based models are weak in modeling long-dependency relation in text, RNN based models are sl…
Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential recommendation (SCSR) is the task of recommending the next item based on a sequence of recorded user behaviors, where multiple users share a single account, and their behaviours are available in multiple domains. Existing work on solving SCSR mainly relies on mining sequential patterns via RNN-based models, which are not expressive enough to capture the relationships among multiple entities. Moreover, all existing algorithms try to bridge two domains via knowledge transfer in the latent space, and the explicit cross-domain graph structure is unexploited. …
Traditional recommendation systems mainly focus on modeling user interests. However, the dynamics of recommended items caused by attribute modifications (e.g. changes in prices) are also of great importance in real systems, especially in the fast-growing e-commerce environment, which may cause the users' demands to emerge, shift and disappear. Recent studies that make efforts on dynamic item representations treat the item attributes as side information but ignore its temporal dependency, or model the item evolution with a sequence of related users but do not consider item attributes. In this p…
Sequential dynamics are a key feature of many modern recommender systems, which seek to capture the `context' of users' activities on the basis of actions they have performed recently. To capture such patterns, two approaches have proliferated: Markov Chains (MCs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Markov Chains assume that a user's next action can be predicted on the basis of just their last (or last few) actions, while RNNs in principle allow for longer-term semantics to be uncovered. Generally speaking, MC-based methods perform best in extremely sparse datasets, where model parsimony is …
Item-to-item collaborative filtering (aka. item-based CF) has been long used for building recommender systems in industrial settings, owing to its interpretability and efficiency in real-time personalization. It builds a user's profile as her historically interacted items, recommending new items that are similar to the user's profile. As such, the key to an item-based CF method is in the estimation of item similarities. Early approaches use statistical measures such as cosine similarity and Pearson coefficient to estimate item similarities, which are less accurate since they lack tailored opti…
Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）
In collaborative filtering, it is an important way to make full use of social information to improve the recommendation quality, which has been proved to be effective because user behavior will be affected by her friends. However, existing works leverage the social relationship to aggregate user features from friends' historical behavior sequences in a user-level indirect paradigm. A significant defect of the indirect paradigm is that it ignores the temporal relationships between behavior events across users. In this paper, we propose a novel time-aware sequential recommendation framework call…
Quaternion space has brought several benefits over the traditional Euclidean space: Quaternions (i) consist of a real and three imaginary components, encouraging richer representations; (ii) utilize Hamilton product which better encodes the inter-latent interactions across multiple Quaternion components; and (iii) result in a model with smaller degrees of freedom and less prone to overfitting. Unfortunately, most of the current recommender systems rely on real-valued representations in Euclidean space to model either user's long-term or short-term interests. In this paper, we fully utilize Qua…
Item-based collaborative filtering (ICF) enjoys the advantages of high recommendation accuracy and ease in online penalization and thus is favored by the industrial recommender systems. ICF recommends items to a target user based on their similarities to the previously interacted items of the user. Great progresses have been achieved for ICF in recent years by applying advanced machine learning techniques (e.g., deep neural networks) to learn the item similarity from data. The early methods simply treat all the historical items equally and recently proposed methods attempt to distinguish the d…
As important side information, attributes have been widely exploited in the existing recommender system for better performance. In the real-world scenarios, it is common that some attributes of items/users are missing (e.g., some movies miss the genre data). Prior studies usually use a default value (i.e., "other") to represent the missing attribute, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, in this paper, we present an attribute-aware attentive graph convolution network (A${^2}$-GCN). In particular, we first construct a graph, whereby users, items, and attributes are thre…
Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven their effectiveness for recommender systems. Existing studies have applied GNNs to capture collaborative relations in the data. However, in real-world scenarios, the relations in a recommendation graph can be of various kinds. For example, two movies may be associated either by the same genre or by the same director/actor. If we use a single graph to elaborate all these relations, the graph can be too complex to process. To address this issue, we bring the idea of pre-training to process the complex graph step by step. Based on the idea of div…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Pingan Health Technology（平安健康科技）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Liaoning University（辽宁大学）；Durham University（杜伦大学）
Recommendation systems aim to assist users to discover most preferred contents from an ever-growing corpus of items. Although recommenders have been greatly improved by deep learning, they still faces several challenges: (1) Behaviors are much more complex than words in sentences, so traditional attentive and recurrent models may fail in capturing the temporal dynamics of user preferences. (2) The preferences of users are multiple and evolving, so it is difficult to integrate long-term memory and short-term intent. In this paper, we propose a temporal gating methodology to improve attention me…
National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli（蒂鲁吉拉帕利国立理工学院）；Delhi Technological University（德里理工大学）；The Learning Machines（学习机器公司）
Session-based recommendation systems suggest relevant items to users by modeling user behavior and preferences using short-term anonymous sessions. Existing methods leverage Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that propagate and aggregate information from neighboring nodes i.e., local message passing. Such graph-based architectures have representational limits, as a single sub-graph is susceptible to overfit the sequential dependencies instead of accounting for complex transitions between items in different sessions. We propose a new technique that leverages a Transformer in combination with a target…
In recommender systems, models mostly use a combination of embedding layers and multilayer feedforward neural networks. The high-dimensional sparse original features are downscaled in the embedding layer and then fed into the fully connected network to obtain prediction results. However, the above methods have a rather obvious problem, that is, the features directly input are treated as independent individuals, and in fact there are internal correlations between features and features, and even different features have different importance in the recommendation. In this regard, this paper adopts…
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…
User-generated item lists are a popular feature of many different platforms. Examples include lists of books on Goodreads, playlists on Spotify and YouTube, collections of images on Pinterest, and lists of answers on question-answer sites like Zhihu. Recommending item lists is critical for increasing user engagement and connecting users to new items, but many approaches are designed for the item-based recommendation, without careful consideration of the complex relationships between items and lists. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel user-generated list recommendation model called AttLis…
Skolkovo Institute of Science；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, 105064, Moscow, Russia
Self-attentive transformer models have recently been shown to solve the next item recommendation task very efficiently. The learned attention weights capture sequential dynamics in user behavior and generalize well. Motivated by the special structure of learned parameter space, we question if it is possible to mimic it with an alternative and more lightweight approach. We develop a new tensor factorization-based model that ingrains the structural knowledge about sequential data within the learning process. We demonstrate how certain properties of a self-attention network can be reproduced with…
Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
This paper proposes a novel neural network, joint training capsule network (JTCN), for the cold start recommendation task. We propose to mimic the high-level user preference other than the raw interaction history based on the side information for the fresh users. Specifically, an attentive capsule layer is proposed to aggregate high-level user preference from the low-level interaction history via a dynamic routing-by-agreement mechanism. Moreover, JTCN jointly trains the loss for mimicking the user preference and the softmax loss for the recommendation together in an end-to-end manner. Experim…
Sequential recommendation predicts users' next behaviors with their historical interactions. Recommending with longer sequences improves recommendation accuracy and increases the degree of personalization. As sequences get longer, existing works have not yet addressed the following two main challenges. Firstly, modeling long-range intra-sequence dependency is difficult with increasing sequence lengths. Secondly, it requires efficient memory and computational speeds. In this paper, we propose a Sparse Attentive Memory (SAM) network for long sequential user behavior modeling. SAM supports effici…
