Traditional recommendation models trained on observational interaction data have generated large impacts in a wide range of applications, it faces bias problems that cover users' true intent and thus deteriorate the recommendation effectiveness. Existing methods tracks this problem as eliminating bias for the robust recommendation, e.g., by re-weighting training samples or learning disentangled representation. The disentangled representation methods as the state-of-the-art eliminate bias through revealing cause-effect of the bias generation. However, how to design the semantics-aware and unbiased representation for users true intents is largely unexplored. To bridge the gap, we are the first to propose an unbiased and semantics-aware disentanglement learning called CaDSI (Causal Disentanglement for Semantics-Aware Intent Learning) from a causal perspective. Particularly, CaDSI explicitly models the causal relations underlying recommendation task, and thus produces semantics-aware representations via disentangling users true intents aware of specific item context. Moreover, the causal intervention mechanism is designed to eliminate confounding bias stemmed from context information, which further to align the semantics-aware representation with users true intent. Extensive experiments and case studies both validate the robustness and interpretability of our proposed model.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Factor Disentanglement for Recommendation in Various Context Scenarios
School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；Beijing Institute of Biotechnology（北京生物技术研究院）
Contrastive Learning Method for Sequential Recommendation based on Multi-Intention Disentanglement
College of Computer, Qinghai Normal University（青海师范大学计算机学院）；The State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Intelligent Information Processing and Application（藏语智能信息处理及应用国家重点实验室）；Tibetan Information Processing and Machine Translation Key Laboratory of Qinghai Province（青海省藏文信息处理与机器翻译重点实验室）；Key Laboratory of Tibetan Information Processing, Ministry of Education（藏文信息处理教育部重点实验室）
One key property in recommender systems is the long-tail distribution in user-item interactions where most items only have few user feedback. Improving the recommendation of tail items can promote novelty and bring positive effects to both users and providers, and thus is a desirable property of recommender systems. Current novel recommendation studies over-emphasize the importance of tail items without differentiating the degree of users' intent on popularity and often incur a sharp decline of accuracy. Moreover, none of existing methods has ever taken the extreme case of tail items, i.e., co…
Out-of-town recommendation is designed for those users who leave their home-town areas and visit the areas they have never been to before. It is challenging to recommend Point-of-Interests (POIs) for out-of-town users since the out-of-town check-in behavior is determined by not only the user's home-town preference but also the user's travel intention. Besides, the user's travel intentions are complex and dynamic, which leads to big difficulties in understanding such intentions precisely. In this paper, we propose a TRAvel-INtention-aware Out-of-town Recommendation framework, named TRAINOR. The…
Knowledge-Aware Multi-Intent Contrastive Learning for Multi-Behavior Recommendation
School of Information Science and Engineering, Yanshan University（燕山大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Xinjiang College Of Science & Technology（新疆科学技术学院信息科学与工程学院）
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
Recommender systems aim to recommend new items to users by learning user and item representations. In practice, these representations are highly entangled as they consist of information about multiple factors, including user's interests, item attributes along with confounding factors such as user conformity, and item popularity. Considering these entangled representations for inferring user preference may lead to biased recommendations (e.g., when the recommender model recommends popular items even if they do not align with the user's interests). Recent research proposes to debias by modeling …
Unveiling Optimal SDG Pathways: An Innovative Approach Leveraging Graph Pruning and Intent Graph for Effective Recommendations
College of Computer, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学计算机学院）；Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院地理科学与资源研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
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…
Sequential Recommendation (SRs) that capture users' dynamic intents by modeling user sequential behaviors can recommend closely accurate products to users. Previous work on SRs is mostly focused on optimizing the recommendation accuracy, often ignoring the recommendation diversity, even though it is an important criterion for evaluating the recommendation performance. Most existing methods for improving the diversity of recommendations are not ideally applicable for SRs because they assume that user intents are static and rely on post-processing the list of recommendations to promote diversity…
Joint Identifiability of Cross-Domain Recommendation via Hierarchical Subspace Disentanglement
Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；The University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；CSIRO’s Data 61（联邦科学与工业研究组织数据61部门）
Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur（印度理工学院卡拉格普尔分校）
User intention which often changes dynamically is considered to be an important factor for modeling users in the design of recommendation systems. Recent studies are starting to focus on predicting user intention (what users want) beyond user preference (what users like). In this work, a user intention model is proposed based on deep sequential topic analysis. The model predicts a user's intention in terms of the topic of interest. The Hybrid Topic Model (HTM) comprising Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Word2Vec is proposed to derive the topic of interest of users and the history of prefe…
Re-ranking models refine item recommendation lists generated by the prior global ranking model, which have demonstrated their effectiveness in improving the recommendation quality. However, most existing re-ranking solutions only learn from implicit feedback with a shared prediction model, which regrettably ignore inter-item relationships under diverse user intentions. In this paper, we propose a novel Intention-aware Re-ranking Model with Dynamic Transformer Encoder (RAISE), aiming to perform user-specific prediction for each individual user based on her intentions. Specifically, we first pro…
Recommender systems have been actively and extensively studied over past decades. In the meanwhile, the boom of Big Data is driving fundamental changes in the development of recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a dynamic intention-aware recommender system to better facilitate users to find desirable products and services. Compare to prior work, our proposal possesses the following advantages: (1) it takes user intentions and demands into account through intention mining techniques. By unearthing user intentions from the historical user-item interactions, and various user digital trac…
Sustaining users' interest and keeping them engaged in the platform is very important for the success of an e-commerce business. A session encompasses different activities of a user between logging into the platform and logging out or making a purchase. User activities in a session can be classified into two groups: Known Intent and Unknown intent. Known intent activity pertains to the session where the intent of a user to browse/purchase a specific product can be easily captured. Whereas in unknown intent activity, the intent of the user is not known. For example, consider the scenario where …
DisenReason: Behavior Disentanglement and Latent Reasoning for Shared-Account Sequential Recommendation
School of Big Data and Software Engineering（大数据与软件工程学院）；College of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences（计算与数学科学学院）；Department of Plastic Surgery（整形外科部门）；College of Environmental Science and Engineering（环境科学与工程学院）
Sequential recommender models are essential components of modern industrial recommender systems. These models learn to predict the next items a user is likely to interact with based on his/her interaction history on the platform. Most sequential recommenders however lack a higher-level understanding of user intents, which often drive user behaviors online. Intent modeling is thus critical for understanding users and optimizing long-term user experience. We propose a probabilistic modeling approach and formulate user intent as latent variables, which are inferred based on user behavior signals …
McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；MILA - Quebec AI Institute（MILA——魁北克人工智能研究所）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）
To offer accurate and diverse recommendation services, recent methods use auxiliary information to foster the learning process of user and item representations. Many SOTA methods fuse different sources of information (user, item, knowledge graph, tags, etc.) into a graph and use Graph Neural Networks to introduce the auxiliary information through the message passing paradigm. In this work, we seek an alternative framework that is light and effective through self-supervised learning across different sources of information, particularly for the commonly accessible item tag information. We use a …
Session-based recommendation (SBR) is proposed to recommend items within short sessions given that user profiles are invisible in various scenarios nowadays, such as e-commerce and short video recommendation. There is a common scenario that user specifies a target category of items as a global filter, however previous SBR settings mainly consider the item sequence and overlook the rich target category information. Therefore, we define a new task called Category-aware Session-Based Recommendation (CSBR), focusing on the above scenario, in which the user-specified category can be efficiently uti…
Session-based recommendation aims to predict a user's next action based on previous actions in the current session. The major challenge is to capture authentic and complete user preferences in the entire session. Recent work utilizes graph structure to represent the entire session and adopts Graph Neural Network to encode session information. This modeling choice has been proved to be effective and achieved remarkable results. However, most of the existing studies only consider each item within the session independently and do not capture session semantics from a high-level perspective. Such l…
SAERec: Constructing Fine-grained Interpretable Intents Priors via Sparse Autoencoders for Recommendation
University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The Education University of Hong Kong（香港教育大学）；Jilin University（吉林大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
In this work, we aim to learn multi-level user intents from the co-interacted patterns of items, so as to obtain high-quality representations of users and items and further enhance the recommendation performance. Towards this end, we develop a novel framework, Hierarchical User Intent Graph Network, which exhibits user intents in a hierarchical graph structure, from the fine-grained to coarse-grained intents. In particular, we get the multi-level user intents by recursively performing two operations: 1) intra-level aggregation, which distills the signal pertinent to user intents from co-intera…
The remarkable progress of network embedding has led to state-of-the-art algorithms in recommendation. However, the sparsity of user-item interactions (i.e., explicit preferences) on websites remains a big challenge for predicting users' behaviors. Although research efforts have been made in utilizing some auxiliary information (e.g., social relations between users) to solve the problem, the existing rich heterogeneous auxiliary relationships are still not fully exploited. Moreover, previous works relied on linearly combined regularizers and suffered parameter tuning. In this work, we collect …
