Session-based recommendation (SBR) is a challenging task, which aims to predict users' future interests based on anonymous behavior sequences. Existing methods leverage powerful representation learning approaches to encode sessions into a low-dimensional space. However, despite such achievements, all the existing studies focus on the instance-level session learning, while neglecting the group-level users' preference, which is significant to model the users' behavior. To this end, we propose a novel Repeat-aware Neural Mechanism for Session-based Recommendation (RNMSR). In RNMSR, we propose to learn the user preference from both instance-level and group-level, respectively: (i) instance-level, which employs GNNs on a similarity-based item-pairwise session graph to capture the users' preference in instance-level. (ii) group-level, which converts sessions into group-level behavior patterns to model the group-level users' preference. In RNMSR, we combine instance-level user preference and group-level user preference to model the repeat consumption of users, \ie whether users take repeated consumption and which items are preferred by users. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world datasets, \ie Diginetica, Yoochoose, and Nowplaying, demonstrating that the proposed method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in all the tests.
Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been popularly studied to utilize different domain knowledge to solve the cold-start problem in recommender systems. Most of the existing CDR models assume that both the source and target domains share the same overlapped user set for knowledge transfer. However, only few proportion of users simultaneously activate on both the source and target domains in practical CDR tasks. In this paper, we focus on the Partially Overlapped Cross-Domain Recommendation (POCDR) problem, that is, how to leverage the information of both the overlapped and non-overlapped use…
Advanced music recommendation systems are being introduced along with the development of machine learning. However, it is essential to design a music recommendation system that can increase user satisfaction by understanding users' music tastes, not by the complexity of models. Although several studies related to music recommendation systems exploiting negative preferences have shown performance improvements, there was a lack of explanation on how they led to better recommendations. In this work, we analyze the role of negative preference in users' music tastes by comparing music recommendatio…
In the modern e-commerce, the behaviors of customers contain rich information, e.g., consumption habits, the dynamics of preferences. Recently, session-based recommendations are becoming popular to explore the temporal characteristics of customers' interactive behaviors. However, existing works mainly exploit the short-term behaviors without fully taking the customers' long-term stable preferences and evolutions into account. In this paper, we propose a novel Behavior-Intensive Neural Network (BINN) for next-item recommendation by incorporating both users' historical stable preferences and pre…
In recommendation systems, utilizing the user interaction history as sequential information has resulted in great performance improvement. However, in many online services, user interactions are commonly grouped by sessions that presumably share preferences, which requires a different approach from ordinary sequence representation techniques. To this end, sequence representation models with a hierarchical structure or various viewpoints have been developed but with a rather complex network structure. In this paper, we propose three methods to improve recommendation performance by exploiting se…
The pervasive use of social media provides massive data about individuals' online social activities and their social relations. The building block of most existing recommendation systems is the similarity between users with social relations, i.e., friends. While friendship ensures some homophily, the similarity of a user with her friends can vary as the number of friends increases. Research from sociology suggests that friends are more similar than strangers, but friends can have different interests. Exogenous information such as comments and ratings may help discern different degrees of agree…
University of the Philippines, Diliman（菲律宾大学迪利曼分校）
The rise of deep learning applications in the fashion industry has fueled advances in curating large-scale datasets to build applications for product design, image retrieval, and recommender systems. In this paper, the author proposes using Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to build an interactive fashion product application framework that allows the users to generate products with attributes according to their liking, retrieve similar styles for the same product category, and receive content-based recommendations from other categories. Fashion product images dataset containing eyewear, footwear, …
The purpose of this master's thesis is to study and develop a new algorithmic framework for collaborative filtering (CF) to generate recommendations. The method we propose is based on the exploitation of the hierarchical structure of the item space and intuitively "stands" on the property of Near Complete Decomposability (NCD) which is inherent in the structure of the majority of hierarchical systems. Building on the intuition behind the NCDawareRank algorithm and its related concept of NCD proximity, we model our system in a way that illuminates its endemic characteristics and we propose a ne…
Recommender systems are personalized information systems. However, in many settings, the end-user of the recommendations is not the only party whose needs must be represented in recommendation generation. Incorporating this insight gives rise to the notion of multistakeholder recommendation, in which the interests of multiple parties are represented in recommendation algorithms and evaluation. In this paper, we identify patterns of stakeholder utility that characterize different multistakeholder recommendation applications, and provide a taxonomy of the different possible systems, only some of…
For present e-commerce platforms, session-based recommender systems are developed to predict users' preference for next-item recommendation. Although a session can usually reflect a user's current preference, a local shift of the user's intention within the session may still exist. Specifically, the interactions that take place in the early positions within a session generally indicate the user's initial intention, while later interactions are more likely to represent the latest intention. Such positional information has been rarely considered in existing methods, which restricts their ability…
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…
University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；L3S Research Center（L3S研究中心）
Recently, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been applied to the task of session-based recommendation. These approaches use RNNs to predict the next item in a user session based on the previ- ously visited items. While some approaches consider additional item properties, we argue that item dwell time can be used as an implicit measure of user interest to improve session-based item recommen- dations. We propose an extension to existing RNN approaches that captures user dwell time in addition to the visited items and show that recommendation performance can be improved. Additionally, we inves…
Recommender algorithms performance is often associated with the availability of sufficient historical rating data. Unfortunately, when it comes to children, this data is seldom available. In this paper, we report on an initial analysis conducted to examine the degree to which data about traditional users, i.e., adults, can be leveraged to enhance the recommendation process for children.
Different from the traditional recommender system, the session-based recommender system introduces the concept of the session, i.e., a sequence of interactions between a user and multiple items within a period, to preserve the user's recent interest. The existing work on the session-based recommender system mainly relies on mining sequential patterns within individual sessions, which are not expressive enough to capture more complicated dependency relationships among items. In addition, it does not consider the cross-session information due to the anonymity of the session data, where the linka…
The increasing availability of implicit feedback datasets has raised the interest in developing effective collaborative filtering techniques able to deal asymmetrically with unambiguous positive feedback and ambiguous negative feedback. In this paper, we propose a principled kernel-based collaborative filtering method for top-N item recommendation with implicit feedback. We present an efficient implementation using the linear kernel, and we show how to generalize it to kernels of the dot product family preserving the efficiency. We also investigate on the elements which influence the sparsity …
Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) manifest great potential in recommendation. This is attributed to their capability on learning good user and item embeddings by exploiting the collaborative signals from the high-order neighbors. Like other GCN models, the GCN based recommendation models also suffer from the notorious over-smoothing problem - when stacking more layers, node embeddings become more similar and eventually indistinguishable, resulted in performance degradation. The recently proposed LightGCN and LR-GCN alleviate this problem to some extent, however, we argue that they overlook an …
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…
Session-based Recommendation (SR) aims to predict the next item for recommendation based on previously recorded sessions of user interaction. The majority of existing approaches to SR focus on modeling the transition patterns of items. In such models, the so-called micro-behaviors describing how the user locates an item and carries out various activities on it (e.g., click, add-to-cart, and read-comments), are simply ignored. A few recent studies have tried to incorporate the sequential patterns of micro-behaviors into SR models. However, those sequential models still cannot effectively captur…
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid（马德里自治大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）
The success of neural network embeddings has entailed a renewed interest in using knowledge graphs for a wide variety of machine learning and information retrieval tasks. In particular, current recommendation methods based on graph embeddings have shown state-of-the-art performance. These methods commonly encode latent rating patterns and content features. Different from previous work, in this paper, we propose to exploit embeddings extracted from graphs that combine information from ratings and aspect-based opinions expressed in textual reviews. We then adapt and evaluate state-of-the-art gra…
In this paper, we study the problem of recommendation system where the users and items to be recommended are rich data structures with multiple entity types and with multiple sources of side-information in the form of graphs. We provide a general formulation for the problem that captures the complexities of modern real-world recommendations and generalizes many existing formulations. In our formulation, each user/document that requires a recommendation and each item or tag that is to be recommended, both are modeled by a set of static entities and a dynamic component. The relationships between…
Personalized news recommendation is an essential technique for online news services. News articles usually contain rich textual content, and accurate news modeling is important for personalized news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods mainly model news texts based on traditional text modeling methods, which is not optimal for mining the deep semantic information in news texts. Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are powerful for natural language understanding, which has the potential for better news modeling. However, there is no public report that show PLMs have been applied t…
User-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most popular approaches to create recommender systems. CF, however, suffers from data sparsity and the cold-start problem since users often rate only a small fraction of available items. One solution is to incorporate additional information into the recommendation process such as explicit trust scores that are assigned by users to others or implicit trust relationships that result from social connections between users. Such relationships typically form a very sparse trust network, which can be utilized to generate recommendations for users …
Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Computer Vision Center, UAB（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；Huawei Ireland Research Center（华为爱尔兰研究中心）
Multi-domain recommender systems benefit from cross-domain representation learning and positive knowledge transfer. Both can be achieved by introducing a specific modeling of input data (i.e. disjoint history) or trying dedicated training regimes. At the same time, treating domains as separate input sources becomes a limitation as it does not capture the interplay that naturally exists between domains. In this work, we efficiently learn multi-domain representation of sequential users' interactions using graph neural networks. We use temporal intra- and inter-domain interactions as contextual i…
This paper proposes a number of explicit and implicit ratings in product recommendation system for Business-to-customer e-commerce purposes. The system recommends the products to a new user. It depends on the purchase pattern of previous users whose purchase pattern is close to that of a user who asks for a recommendation. The system is based on weighted cosine similarity measure to find out the closest user profile among the profiles of all users in database. It also implements Association rule mining rule in recommending the products. Also, this product recommendation system takes into consi…
Understanding user preference is essential to the optimization of recommender systems. As a feedback of user's taste, rating scores can directly reflect the preference of a given user to a given product. Uncovering the latent components of user ratings is thus of significant importance for learning user interests. In this paper, a new recommendation approach, called LCR, was proposed by investigating the latent components of user ratings. The basic idea is to decompose an existing rating into several components via a cost-sensitive learning strategy. Specifically, each rating is assigned to se…
Predicting a user's preference in a short anonymous interaction session instead of long-term history is a challenging problem in the real-life session-based recommendation, e.g., e-commerce and media stream. Recent research of the session-based recommender system mainly focuses on sequential patterns by utilizing the attention mechanism, which is straightforward for the session's natural sequence sorted by time. However, the user's preference is much more complicated than a solely consecutive time pattern in the transition of item choices. In this paper, therefore, we study the item transition…
Prior work on personalized recommendations has focused on exploiting explicit signals from user-specific queries, clicks, likes, and ratings. This paper investigates tapping into a different source of implicit signals of interests and tastes: online chats between users. The paper develops an expressive model and effective methods for personalizing search-based entity recommendations. User models derived from chats augment different methods for re-ranking entity answers for medium-grained queries. The paper presents specific techniques to enhance the user models by capturing domain-specific voc…
How can we leverage social network data and observed ratings to correctly recommend proper items and provide a persuasive explanation for the recommendations? Many online services provide social networks among users, and it is crucial to utilize social information since recommendation by a friend is more likely to grab attention than the one from a random user. Also, explaining why items are recommended is very important in encouraging the users' actions such as actual purchases. Exploiting both ratings and social graph for recommendation, however, is not trivial because of the heterogeneity o…
Pohang University of Science and Technology（浦项科技大学）
Recommender systems have achieved great success in modeling user's preferences on items and predicting the next item the user would consume. Recently, there have been many efforts to utilize time information of users' interactions with items to capture inherent temporal patterns of user behaviors and offer timely recommendations at a given time. Existing studies regard the time information as a single type of feature and focus on how to associate it with user preferences on items. However, we argue they are insufficient for fully learning the time information because the temporal patterns of u…
Current sequential recommender systems are proposed to tackle the dynamic user preference learning with various neural techniques, such as Transformer and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, inference from the highly sparse user behavior data may hinder the representation ability of sequential pattern encoding. To address the label shortage issue, contrastive learning (CL) methods are proposed recently to perform data augmentation in two fashions: (i) randomly corrupting the sequence data (e.g. stochastic masking, reordering); (ii) aligning representations across pre-defined contrastive vie…
Writing review for a purchased item is a unique channel to express a user's opinion in E-Commerce. Recently, many deep learning based solutions have been proposed by exploiting user reviews for rating prediction. In contrast, there has been few attempt to enlist the semantic signals covered by user reviews for the task of collaborative filtering. In this paper, we propose a novel review-driven neural sequential recommendation model (named RNS) by considering users' intrinsic preference (long-term) and sequential patterns (short-term). In detail, RNS is devised to encode each user or item with …
Session-based recommendation targets next-item prediction by exploiting user behaviors within a short time period. Compared with other recommendation paradigms, session-based recommendation suffers more from the problem of data sparsity due to the very limited short-term interactions. Self-supervised learning, which can discover ground-truth samples from the raw data, holds vast potentials to tackle this problem. However, existing self-supervised recommendation models mainly rely on item/segment dropout to augment data, which are not fit for session-based recommendation because the dropout lea…
Cross-domain recommendation has long been one of the major topics in recommender systems. Recently, various deep models have been proposed to transfer the learned knowledge across domains, but most of them focus on extracting abstract transferable features from auxilliary contents, e.g., images and review texts, and the patterns in the rating matrix itself is rarely touched. In this work, inspired by the concept of domain adaptation, we proposed a deep domain adaptation model (DARec) that is capable of extracting and transferring patterns from rating matrices {\em only} without relying on any …
There has been growing interests in recent years from both practical and research perspectives for session-based recommendation tasks as long-term user profiles do not often exist in many real-life recommendation applications. In this case, recommendations for user's immediate next actions need to be generated based on patterns in anonymous short sessions. An often overlooked aspect is that new items with limited observations arrive continuously in many domains (e.g. news and discussion forums). Therefore, recommendations need to be adaptive to such frequent changes. In this paper, we benchmar…
Graph Neural Network(GNN) based social recommendation models improve the prediction accuracy of user preference by leveraging GNN in exploiting preference similarity contained in social relations. However, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency of recommendation, a large portion of social relations can be redundant or even noisy, e.g., it is quite normal that friends share no preference in a certain domain. Existing models do not fully solve this problem of relation redundancy and noise, as they directly characterize social influence over the full social network. In this paper, we inste…
Music recommender systems have become central parts of popular streaming platforms such as Last.fm, Pandora, or Spotify to help users find music that fits their preferences. These systems learn from the past listening events of users to recommend music a user will likely listen to in the future. Here, current algorithms typically employ collaborative filtering (CF) utilizing similarities between users' listening behaviors. Some approaches also combine CF with content features into hybrid recommender systems. While music recommender systems can provide quality recommendations to listeners of ma…
Multi-behavior recommendation, which exploits auxiliary behaviors (e.g., click and cart) to help predict users' potential interactions on the target behavior (e.g., buy), is regarded as an effective way to alleviate the data sparsity or cold-start issues in recommendation. Multi-behaviors are often taken in certain orders in real-world applications (e.g., click>cart>buy). In a behavior chain, a latter behavior usually exhibits a stronger signal of user preference than the former one does. Most existing multi-behavior models fail to capture such dependencies in a behavior chain for embedding le…
Over the last few years, MaaS has been extensively studied and evolved into offering a multitude of mobility services that continuously increase, from alternative car or bike-sharing modes to autonomous vehicles, that aspire to become a part of this novel ecosystem. MaaS provides end-users with multimodal, integrated, and digital mobility solutions, including a multitude of different choices able to cover users specific needs in a personalized manner. This practically leads to a range of novel MaaS products, that may have complex structures and the challenge of matching them to user preference…
Advances in smartphone technology have promoted the rapid development of mobile apps. However, the availability of a huge number of mobile apps in application stores has imposed the challenge of finding the right apps to meet the user needs. Indeed, there is a critical demand for personalized app recommendations. Along this line, there are opportunities and challenges posed by two unique characteristics of mobile apps. First, app markets have organized apps in a hierarchical taxonomy. Second, apps with similar functionalities are competing with each other. While there are a variety of approach…
Predicting the next location is a highly valuable and common need in many location-based services such as destination prediction and route planning. The goal of next location recommendation is to predict the next point-of-interest a user might go to based on the user's historical trajectory. Most existing models learn mobility patterns merely from users' historical check-in sequences while overlooking the significance of user preference modeling. In this work, a novel Point-of-Interest Transformer (POIFormer) with contrastive user preference modeling is developed for end-to-end next location r…
