We consider an online model for recommendation systems, with each user being recommended an item at each time-step and providing 'like' or 'dislike' feedback. A latent variable model specifies the user preferences: both users and items are clustered into types. The model captures structure in both the item and user spaces, as used by item-item and user-user collaborative filtering algorithms. We study the situation in which the type preference matrix has i.i.d. entries. Our main contribution is an algorithm that simultaneously uses both item and user structures, proved to be near-optimal via corresponding information-theoretic lower bounds. In particular, our analysis highlights the sub-optimality of using only one of item or user structure (as is done in most collaborative filtering algorithms).
Beijng University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Next basket recommendation, which aims to predict the next a few items that a user most probably purchases given his historical transactions, plays a vital role in market basket analysis. From the viewpoint of item, an item could be purchased by different users together with different items, for different reasons. Therefore, an ideal recommender system should represent an item considering its transaction contexts. Existing state-of-the-art deep learning methods usually adopt the static item representations, which are invariant among all of the transactions and thus cannot achieve the full pote…
Traditional recommendation systems rely on past usage data in order to generate new recommendations. Those approaches fail to generate sensible recommendations for new users and items into the system due to missing information about their past interactions. In this paper, we propose a solution for successfully addressing item-cold start problem which uses model-based approach and recent advances in deep learning. In particular, we use latent factor model for recommendation, and predict the latent factors from item's descriptions using convolutional neural network when they cannot be obtained f…
Industry-scale recommendation systems have become a cornerstone of the e-commerce shopping experience. For Etsy, an online marketplace with over 50 million handmade and vintage items, users come to rely on personalized recommendations to surface relevant items from its massive inventory. One hallmark of Etsy's shopping experience is the multitude of ways in which a user can interact with an item they are interested in: they can view it, favorite it, add it to a collection, add it to cart, purchase it, etc. We hypothesize that the different ways in which a user interacts with an item indicates …
The gap between the randomly initialized item ID embedding and the well-trained warm item ID embedding makes the cold items hard to suit the recommendation system, which is trained on the data of historical warm items. To alleviate the performance decline of new items recommendation, the distribution of the new item ID embedding should be close to that of the historical warm items. To achieve this goal, we propose an Adversarial Variational Auto-encoder Warm-up model (AVAEW) to generate warm-up item ID embedding for cold items. Specifically, we develop a conditional variational auto-encoder mo…
In this paper, we investigate the common scenario where every candidate item for recommendation is characterized by a maximum capacity, i.e., number of seats in a Point-of-Interest (POI) or size of an item's inventory. Despite the prevalence of the task of recommending items under capacity constraints in a variety of settings, to the best of our knowledge, none of the known recommender methods is designed to respect capacity constraints. To close this gap, we extend three state-of-the art latent factor recommendation approaches: probabilistic matrix factorization (PMF), geographical matrix fac…
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Central Queensland University（中央昆士兰大学）；Chongqing Meiqi Industry Co.（重庆美琪实业有限公司）；Aliexpress, Alibaba group（阿里巴巴集团全球速卖通）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
In recommender systems, the user-item interaction data is usually sparse and not sufficient for learning comprehensive user/item representations for recommendation. To address this problem, we propose a novel dual-bridging recommendation model (DBRec). DBRec performs latent user/item group discovery simultaneously with collaborative filtering, and interacts group information with users/items for bridging similar users/items. Therefore, a user's preference over an unobserved item, in DBRec, can be bridged by the users within the same group who have rated the item, or the user-rated items that s…
This paper proposes a theoretical analysis of recommendation systems in an online setting, where items are sequentially recommended to users over time. In each round, a user, randomly picked from a population of $m$ users, requests a recommendation. The decision-maker observes the user and selects an item from a catalogue of $n$ items. Importantly, an item cannot be recommended twice to the same user. The probabilities that a user likes each item are unknown. The performance of the recommendation algorithm is captured through its regret, considering as a reference an Oracle algorithm aware of …
In this paper we consider an online recommendation setting, where a platform recommends a sequence of items to its users at every time period. The users respond by selecting one of the items recommended or abandon the platform due to fatigue from seeing less useful items. Assuming a parametric stochastic model of user behavior, which captures positional effects of these items as well as the abandoning behavior of users, the platform's goal is to recommend sequences of items that are competitive to the single best sequence of items in hindsight, without knowing the true user model a priori. Nai…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；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）；Artificial Intelligence Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院人工智能创新研究院）
Multimedia content is of predominance in the modern Web era. Investigating how users interact with multimodal items is a continuing concern within the rapid development of recommender systems. The majority of previous work focuses on modeling user-item interactions with multimodal features included as side information. However, this scheme is not well-designed for multimedia recommendation. Specifically, only collaborative item-item relationships are implicitly modeled through high-order item-user-item relations. Considering that items are associated with rich contents in multiple modalities, …
Tencent（腾讯）；Telefonica Research（西班牙电信研究院）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been recently introduced in the domain of session-based next item recommendation. An ordered collection of past items the user has interacted with in a session (or sequence) are embedded into a 2-dimensional latent matrix, and treated as an image. The convolution and pooling operations are then applied to the mapped item embeddings. In this paper, we first examine the typical session-based CNN recommender and show that both the generative model and network architecture are suboptimal when modeling long-range dependencies in the item sequence. To addres…
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.
We present a collection recommender system that can automatically create and recommend collections of items at a user level. Unlike regular recommender systems, which output top-N relevant items, a collection recommender system outputs collections of items such that the items in the collections are relevant to a user, and the items within a collection follow a specific theme. Our system builds on top of the user-item representations learnt by item recommender systems. We employ dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques along with intuitive heuristics to create collections with their r…
In Recommender Systems research, algorithms are often characterized as either Collaborative Filtering (CF) or Content Based (CB). CF algorithms are trained using a dataset of user preferences while CB algorithms are typically based on item profiles. These approaches harness different data sources and therefore the resulting recommended items are generally very different. This paper presents the CB2CF, a deep neural multiview model that serves as a bridge from items content into their CF representations. CB2CF is a real-world algorithm designed for Microsoft Store services that handle around a …
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games such as Dota 2 attract hundreds of thousands of players every year. Despite the large player base, it is still important to attract new players to prevent the community of a game from becoming inactive. Entering MOBA games is, however, often demanding, requiring the player to learn numerous skills at once. An important factor of success is buying the correct items which forms a complex task depending on various in-game factors such as already purchased items, the team composition, or available resources. A recommendation system can support players b…
There are rich formats of information in the network, such as rating, text, image, and so on, which represent different aspects of user preferences. In the field of recommendation, how to use those data effectively has become a difficult subject. With the rapid development of neural network, researching on multi-modal method for recommendation has become one of the major directions. In the existing recommender systems, numerical rating, item description and review are main information to be considered by researchers. However, the characteristics of the item may affect the user's preferences, w…
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology（新加坡制造技术研究院）
Graph-based recommendation models work well for top-N recommender systems due to their capability to capture the potential relationships between entities. However, most of the existing methods only construct a single global item graph shared by all the users and regrettably ignore the diverse tastes between different user groups. Inspired by the success of local models for recommendation, this paper provides the first attempt to investigate multiple local item graphs along with a global item graph for graph-based recommendation models. We argue that recommendation on global and local graphs ou…
Identifying relationships between items is a key task of an online recommender system, in order to help users discover items that are functionally complementary or visually compatible. In domains like clothing recommendation, this task is particularly challenging since a successful system should be capable of handling a large corpus of items, a huge amount of relationships among them, as well as the high-dimensional and semantically complicated features involved. Furthermore, the human notion of "compatibility" to capture goes beyond mere similarity: For two items to be compatible---whether je…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Tencent Quantum Lab（腾讯量子实验室）；Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute（清华-伯克利深圳学院）
The item cold-start problem seriously limits the recommendation performance of Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods when new items have either none or very little interactions. To solve this issue, many modern Internet applications propose to predict a new item's interaction from the possessing contents. However, it is difficult to design and learn a map between the item's interaction history and the corresponding contents. In this paper, we apply the Wasserstein distance to address the item cold-start problem. Given item content information, we can calculate the similarity between the interac…
University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；Samsung Research America（三星美国研究院）
Recommending new items to existing users has remained a challenging problem due to absence of user's past preferences for these items. The user personalized non-collaborative methods based on item features can be used to address this item cold-start problem. These methods rely on similarities between the target item and user's previous preferred items. While computing similarities based on item features, these methods overlook the interactions among the features of the items and consider them independently. Modeling interactions among features can be helpful as some features, when considered t…
Brigham Young University（杨百翰大学）；University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）
Collaborative filtering is used to recommend items to a user without requiring a knowledge of the item itself and tends to outperform other techniques. However, collaborative filtering suffers from the cold-start problem, which occurs when an item has not yet been rated or a user has not rated any items. Incorporating additional information, such as item or user descriptions, into collaborative filtering can address the cold-start problem. In this paper, we present a neural network model with latent input variables (latent neural network or LNN) as a hybrid collaborative filtering technique th…
Kiel University（基尔大学）；ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics（ZBW——莱布尼茨经济信息中心）
We present multi-modal adversarial autoencoders for recommendation and evaluate them on two different tasks: citation recommendation and subject label recommendation. We analyze the effects of adversarial regularization, sparsity, and different input modalities. By conducting 408 experiments, we show that adversarial regularization consistently improves the performance of autoencoders for recommendation. We demonstrate, however, that the two tasks differ in the semantics of item co-occurrence in the sense that item co-occurrence resembles relatedness in case of citations, yet implies diversity…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；Kuaishou Inc.（快手公司）
Static recommendation methods like collaborative filtering suffer from the inherent limitation of performing real-time personalization for cold-start users. Online recommendation, e.g., multi-armed bandit approach, addresses this limitation by interactively exploring user preference online and pursuing the exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off. However, existing bandit-based methods model recommendation actions homogeneously. Specifically, they only consider the items as the arms, being incapable of handling the item attributes, which naturally provide interpretable information of user's cur…
Recommenders personalize the web content by typically using collaborative filtering to relate users (or items) based on explicit feedback, e.g., ratings. The difficulty of collecting this feedback has recently motivated to consider implicit feedback (e.g., item consumption along with the corresponding time). In this paper, we introduce the notion of consumed item pack (CIP) which enables to link users (or items) based on their implicit analogous consumption behavior. Our proposal is generic, and we show that it captures three novel implicit recommenders: a user-based (CIP-U), an item-based (CI…
