Recently, neural networks have been widely used in e-commerce recommender systems, owing to the rapid development of deep learning. We formalize the recommender system as a sequential recommendation problem, intending to predict the next items that the user might be interacted with. Recent works usually give an overall embedding from a user's behavior sequence. However, a unified user embedding cannot reflect the user's multiple interests during a period. In this paper, we propose a novel controllable multi-interest framework for the sequential recommendation, called ComiRec. Our multi-interest module captures multiple interests from user behavior sequences, which can be exploited for retrieving candidate items from the large-scale item pool. These items are then fed into an aggregation module to obtain the overall recommendation. The aggregation module leverages a controllable factor to balance the recommendation accuracy and diversity. We conduct experiments for the sequential recommendation on two real-world datasets, Amazon and Taobao. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models. Our framework has also been successfully deployed on the offline Alibaba distributed cloud platform.
The main task of personalized recommendation is capturing users' interests based on their historical behaviors. Most of recent advances in recommender systems mainly focus on modeling users' preferences accurately using deep learning based approaches. There are two important properties of users' interests, one is that users' interests are dynamic and evolve over time, the other is that users' interests have different resolutions, or temporal-ranges to be precise, such as long-term and short-term preferences. Existing approaches either use Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to address the drifts …
Point-of-Interest (POI) recommender systems play a vital role in people's lives by recommending unexplored POIs to users and have drawn extensive attention from both academia and industry. Despite their value, however, they still suffer from the challenges of capturing complicated user preferences and fine-grained user-POI relationship for spatio-temporal sensitive POI recommendation. Existing recommendation algorithms, including both shallow and deep approaches, usually embed the visiting records of a user into a single latent vector to model user preferences: this has limited power of repres…
Deep Adaptive Interest Network: Personalized Recommendation with Context-Aware Learning
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）；University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Personalized recommendation systems (RS) are extensively used in many services. Many of these are based on learning algorithms where the RS uses the recommendation history and the user response to learn an optimal strategy. Further, these algorithms are based on the assumption that the user interests are rigid. Specifically, they do not account for the effect of learning strategy on the evolution of the user interests. In this paper we develop influence models for a learning algorithm that is used to optimally recommend websites to web users. We adapt the model of \cite{Ioannidis10} to include…
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Industrial recommender systems usually consist of the matching stage and the ranking stage, in order to handle the billion-scale of users and items. The matching stage retrieves candidate items relevant to user interests, while the ranking stage sorts candidate items by user interests. Thus, the most critical ability is to model and represent user interests for either stage. Most of the existing deep learning-based models represent one user as a single vector which is insufficient to capture the varying nature of user's interests. In this paper, we approach this problem from a different view, …
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院（KAIST））；Clova AI Research, NAVER Corp.（NAVER公司Clova AI研究部）
A long user history inevitably reflects the transitions of personal interests over time. The analyses on the user history require the robust sequential model to anticipate the transitions and the decays of user interests. The user history is often modeled by various RNN structures, but the RNN structures in the recommendation system still suffer from the long-term dependency and the interest drifts. To resolve these challenges, we suggest HCRNN with three hierarchical contexts of the global, the local, and the temporary interests. This structure is designed to withhold the global long-term int…
Learning distributed representations of documents has pushed the state-of-the-art in several natural language processing tasks and was successfully applied to the field of recommender systems recently. In this paper, we propose a novel content-based recommender system based on learned representations and a generative model of user interest. Our method works as follows: First, we learn representations on a corpus of text documents. Then, we capture a user's interest as a generative model in the space of the document representations. In particular, we model the distribution of interest for each …
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)（孟加拉国工程技术大学（BUET））
Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) enable users to socialize with friends and acquaintances by sharing their check-ins, opinions, photos, and reviews. Huge volume of data generated from LBSNs opens up a new avenue of research that gives birth to a new sub-field of recommendation systems, known as Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation. A POI recommendation technique essentially exploits users' historical check-ins and other multi-modal information such as POI attributes and friendship network, to recommend the next set of POIs suitable for a user. A plethora of earlier works focused on tra…
Online Peer to Peer Lending (P2PL) systems connect lenders and borrowers directly, thereby making it convenient to borrow and lend money without intermediaries such as banks. Many recommendation systems have been developed for lenders to achieve higher interest rates and avoid defaulting loans. However, there has not been much research in developing recommendation systems to help borrowers make wise decisions. On P2PL platforms, borrowers can either apply for bidding loans, where the interest rate is determined by lenders bidding on a loan or traditional loans where the P2PL platform determine…
Most if not all on-line item-to-item recommendation systems rely on estimation of a distance like measure (rank) of similarity between items. For on-line recommendation systems, time sensitivity of this similarity measure is extremely important. We observe that recommendation "recency" can be straightforwardly and transparently maintained by iterative reduction of ranks of inactive items. The paper briefly summarizes algorithmic developments based on this self-explanatory observation. The basic idea behind this work is patented in a context of online recommendation systems.
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）；Open University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯开放大学）
The rapid growth of users' involvement in Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) has led to the expeditious growth of the data on a global scale. The need of accessing and retrieving relevant information close to users' preferences is an open problem which continuously raises new challenges for recommendation systems. The exploitation of Points-of-Interest (POIs) recommendation by existing models is inadequate due to the sparsity and the cold start problems. To overcome these problems many models were proposed in the literature, but most of them ignore important factors such as: geographical p…
The suggestion of Points of Interest to people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) challenges recommender systems research because these users' perception of places is influenced by idiosyncratic sensory aversions which can mine their experience by causing stress and anxiety. Therefore, managing individual preferences is not enough to provide these people with suitable recommendations. In order to address this issue, we propose a Top-N recommendation model that combines the user's idiosyncratic aversions with her/his preferences in a personalized way to suggest the most compatible and likable …
Recommender systems usually face the issue of filter bubbles: overrecommending homogeneous items based on user features and historical interactions. Filter bubbles will grow along the feedback loop and inadvertently narrow user interests. Existing work usually mitigates filter bubbles by incorporating objectives apart from accuracy such as diversity and fairness. However, they typically sacrifice accuracy, hurting model fidelity and user experience. Worse still, users have to passively accept the recommendation strategy and influence the system in an inefficient manner with high latency, e.g.,…
In this paper, we consider controllability as a means to satisfy dynamic preferences of users, enabling them to control recommendations such that their current preference is met. While deep models have shown improved performance for collaborative filtering, they are generally not amenable to fine grained control by a user, leading to the development of methods like deep language critiquing. We propose an alternate view, where instead of keyphrase based critiques, a user is provided 'knobs' in a disentangled latent space, with each knob corresponding to an item aspect. Disentanglement here refe…
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…
Trip recommendation is an important location-based service that helps relieve users from the time and efforts for trip planning. It aims to recommend a sequence of places of interest (POIs) for a user to visit that maximizes the user's satisfaction. When adding a POI to a recommended trip, it is essential to understand the context of the recommendation, including the POI popularity, other POIs co-occurring in the trip, and the preferences of the user. These contextual factors are learned separately in existing studies, while in reality, they impact jointly on a user's choice of a POI to visit.…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
Resource constraints, e.g. limited product inventory or financial strength, may affect consumers' choices or preferences in some recommendation tasks but are usually ignored in previous recommendation methods. In this paper, we aim to mine the cue of user preferences in resource-limited recommendation tasks, for which purpose we specifically build a large used car transaction dataset possessing resource-limitation characteristics. Accordingly, we propose an interest-behavior multiplicative network to predict the user's future interaction based on dynamic connections between users and items. To…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
With the information explosion of news articles, personalized news recommendation has become important for users to quickly find news that they are interested in. Existing methods on news recommendation mainly include collaborative filtering methods which rely on direct user-item interactions and content based methods which characterize the content of user reading history. Although these methods have achieved good performances, they still suffer from data sparse problem, since most of them fail to extensively exploit high-order structure information (similar users tend to read similar news art…
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
In many classical e-commerce platforms, personalized recommendation has been proven to be of great business value, which can improve user satisfaction and increase the revenue of platforms. In this paper, we present a new recommendation problem, Trigger-Induced Recommendation (TIR), where users' instant interest can be explicitly induced with a trigger item and follow-up related target items are recommended accordingly. TIR has become ubiquitous and popular in e-commerce platforms. In this paper, we figure out that although existing recommendation models are effective in traditional recommenda…
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）；The University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）
Social recommendation has emerged to leverage social connections among users for predicting users' unknown preferences, which could alleviate the data sparsity issue in collaborative filtering based recommendation. Early approaches relied on utilizing each user's first-order social neighbors' interests for better user modeling and failed to model the social influence diffusion process from the global social network structure. Recently, we propose a preliminary work of a neural influence diffusion network (i.e., DiffNet) for social recommendation (Diffnet), which models the recursive social dif…
With the rapid increase of micro-video creators and viewers, how to make personalized recommendations from a large number of candidates to viewers begins to attract more and more attention. However, existing micro-video recommendation models rely on expensive multi-modal information and learn an overall interest embedding that cannot reflect the user's multiple interests in micro-videos. Recently, contrastive learning provides a new opportunity for refining the existing recommendation techniques. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to extract contrastive multi-interests and devise a micro-vid…
User interest modeling is critical for personalized news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually learn a single user embedding for each user from their previous behaviors to represent their overall interest. However, user interest is usually diverse and multi-grained, which is difficult to be accurately modeled by a single user embedding. In this paper, we propose a news recommendation method with hierarchical user interest modeling, named HieRec. Instead of a single user embedding, in our method each user is represented in a hierarchical interest tree to better capture th…
The aim of session-based recommendation is to predict the users' next clicked item, which is a challenging task due to the inherent uncertainty in user behaviors and anonymous implicit feedback information. A powerful session-based recommender can typically explore the users' evolving interests (i.e., a combination of his/her long-term and short-term interests). Recent advances in attention mechanisms have led to state-of-the-art methods for solving this task. However, there are two main drawbacks. First, most of the attention-based methods only simply utilize the last clicked item to represen…
RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）；Data61/CSIRO（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织 Data61）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is one of the most important location-based services helping people discover interesting venues or services. However, the extreme user-POI matrix sparsity and the varying spatio-temporal context pose challenges for POI systems, which affects the quality of POI recommendations. To this end, we propose a translation-based relation embedding for POI recommendation. Our approach encodes the temporal and geographic information, as well as semantic contents effectively in a low-dimensional relation space by using Knowledge Graph Embedding techniques. To further…
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Cross-domain recommendation has attracted increasing attention from industry and academia recently. However, most existing methods do not exploit the interest invariance between domains, which would yield sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a cross-domain recommendation method: Self-supervised Interest Transfer Network (SITN), which can effectively transfer invariant knowledge between domains via prototypical contrastive learning. Specifically, we perform two levels of cross-domain contrastive learning: 1) instance-to-instance contrastive learning, 2) instance-to-cluster contrasti…
Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation that suggests new places for users to visit arises with the popularity of location-based social networks (LBSNs). Due to the importance of POI recommendation in LBSNs, it has attracted much academic and industrial interest. In this paper, we offer a systematic review of this field, summarizing the contributions of individual efforts and exploring their relations. We discuss the new properties and challenges in POI recommendation, compared with traditional recommendation problems, e.g., movie recommendation. Then, we present a comprehensive review in three…
Recent methods in sequential recommendation focus on learning an overall embedding vector from a user's behavior sequence for the next-item recommendation. However, from empirical analysis, we discovered that a user's behavior sequence often contains multiple conceptually distinct items, while a unified embedding vector is primarily affected by one's most recent frequent actions. Thus, it may fail to infer the next preferred item if conceptually similar items are not dominant in recent interactions. To this end, an alternative solution is to represent each user with multiple embedding vectors …
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）
The problem of session-based recommendation aims to predict user next actions based on session histories. Previous methods models session histories into sequences and estimate user latent features by RNN and GNN methods to make recommendations. However under massive-scale and complicated financial recommendation scenarios with both virtual and real commodities , such methods are not sufficient to represent accurate user latent features and neglect the long-term characteristics of users. To take long-term preference and dynamic interests into account, we propose a novel method, i.e. User-Based …
Accurate user interest modeling is important for news recommendation. Most existing methods for news recommendation rely on implicit feedbacks like click for inferring user interests and model training. However, click behaviors usually contain heavy noise, and cannot help infer complicated user interest such as dislike. Besides, the feed recommendation models trained solely on click behaviors cannot optimize other objectives such as user engagement. In this paper, we present a news feed recommendation method that can exploit various kinds of user feedbacks to enhance both user interest modelin…
Modeling user's long-term and short-term interests is crucial for accurate recommendation. However, since there is no manually annotated label for user interests, existing approaches always follow the paradigm of entangling these two aspects, which may lead to inferior recommendation accuracy and interpretability. In this paper, to address it, we propose a Contrastive learning framework to disentangle Long and Short-term interests for Recommendation (CLSR) with self-supervision. Specifically, we first propose two separate encoders to independently capture user interests of different time scale…
News recommendation aims to match news with personalized user interest. Existing methods for news recommendation usually model user interest from historical clicked news without the consideration of candidate news. However, each user usually has multiple interests, and it is difficult for these methods to accurately match a candidate news with a specific user interest. In this paper, we present a candidate-aware user modeling method for personalized news recommendation, which can incorporate candidate news into user modeling for better matching between candidate news and user interest. We prop…
