Sequential recommendation aims to predict each user's next preferred item based on their historical interactions. Recently, diffusion-based approaches have demonstrated strong generative capability in modeling complex user preferences. However, they still face two inherent limitations: (i) Gaussian priors are misaligned with user-specific interests, and curved noise schedules lead to error accumulation and unstable training; (ii) the stochastic denoising process introduces additional randomness and substantial computational overhead. To address these issues, we propose FlowRec, a flow-matching-based framework that formulates preference evolution as continuous flows between personalized priors and target items. Specifically, FlowRec constructs an informative behavior-based prior distribution derived from users' historical interactions, offering a distributionally closer initialization to the target distribution. It then learns a vector field to guide straight preference flows toward target interests. Moreover, a single-step alignment objective with positive and negative samples further enhances semantic consistency between generated representations and ground-truth items. Finally, FlowRec adopts deterministic ODE-based generation, achieving efficient and stable inference. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that FlowRec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both recommendation accuracy and inference efficiency.
Recently, researchers have turned their attention to recommender systems that use only minimal necessary data. This trend is informed by the idea that recommender systems should use no more user interactions than are needed in order to provide users with useful recommendations. In this position paper, we make the case for applying the idea of minimal necessary data to recommender systems that use user reviews. We argue that the content of individual user reviews should be subject to minimization. Specifically, reviews used as training data to generate recommendations or reviews used to help us…
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly (LILY)（南洋理工大学-不列颠哥伦比亚大学老年活跃生活联合卓越研究中心）；Alibaba-NTU Singapore Joint Research Institute（阿里巴巴-南洋理工大学新加坡联合研究院）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Proper initialization is crucial to the optimization and the generalization of neural networks. However, most existing neural recommendation systems initialize the user and item embeddings randomly. In this work, we propose a new initialization scheme for user and item embeddings called Laplacian Eigenmaps with Popularity-based Regularization for Isolated Data (LEPORID). LEPORID endows the embeddings with information regarding multi-scale neighborhood structures on the data manifold and performs adaptive regularization to compensate for high embedding variance on the tail of the data distribut…
This paper proposes a new approach to training recommender systems called deviation-based learning. The recommender and rational users have different knowledge. The recommender learns user knowledge by observing what action users take upon receiving recommendations. Learning eventually stalls if the recommender always suggests a choice: Before the recommender completes learning, users start following the recommendations blindly, and their choices do not reflect their knowledge. The learning rate and social welfare improve substantially if the recommender abstains from recommending a particular…
Providing model-generated explanations in recommender systems is important to user experience. State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms - especially collaborative filtering (CF)-based approaches with shallow or deep models - usually work with various unstructured information sources for recommendation, such as textual reviews, visual images, and various implicit or explicit feedbacks. Though structured knowledge bases were considered in content-based approaches, they have been largely ignored recently due to the research focus on CF approaches. However, structured knowledge exhibit unique ad…
Explaining automatically generated recommendations allows users to make more informed and accurate decisions about which results to utilize, and therefore improves their satisfaction. In this work, we develop a multi-task learning solution for explainable recommendation. Two companion learning tasks of user preference modeling for recommendation} and \textit{opinionated content modeling for explanation are integrated via a joint tensor factorization. As a result, the algorithm predicts not only a user's preference over a list of items, i.e., recommendation, but also how the user would apprecia…
Advanced Analytics Institute, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学高级分析学院）
While recommendation plays an increasingly critical role in our living, study, work, and entertainment, the recommendations we receive are often for irrelevant, duplicate, or uninteresting products and services. A critical reason for such bad recommendations lies in the intrinsic assumption that recommended users and items are independent and identically distributed (IID) in existing theories and systems. Another phenomenon is that, while tremendous efforts have been made to model specific aspects of users or items, the overall user and item characteristics and their non-IIDness have been over…
A huge amount of user generated content related to movies is created with the popularization of web 2.0. With these continues exponential growth of data, there is an inevitable need for recommender systems as people find it difficult to make informed and timely decisions. Movie recommendation systems assist users to find the next interest or the best recommendation. In this proposed approach the authors apply the relationship of user feature-scores derived from user-item interaction via ratings to optimize the prediction algorithm's input parameters used in the recommender system to improve th…
Though recommender systems are defined by personalization, recent work has shown the importance of additional, beyond-accuracy objectives, such as fairness. Because users often expect their recommendations to be purely personalized, these new algorithmic objectives must be communicated transparently in a fairness-aware recommender system. While explanation has a long history in recommender systems research, there has been little work that attempts to explain systems that use a fairness objective. Even though the previous work in other branches of AI has explored the use of explanations as a to…
Explanations in a recommender system assist users in making informed decisions among a set of recommended items. Great research attention has been devoted to generating natural language explanations to depict how the recommendations are generated and why the users should pay attention to them. However, due to different limitations of those solutions, e.g., template-based or generation-based, it is hard to make the explanations easily perceivable, reliable and personalized at the same time. In this work, we develop a graph attentive neural network model that seamlessly integrates user, item, at…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）
Food choices are personal and complex and have a significant impact on our long-term health and quality of life. By helping users to make informed and satisfying decisions, Recommender Systems (RS) have the potential to support users in making healthier food choices. Intelligent users-modeling is a key challenge in achieving this potential. This paper investigates Ensemble Topic Modelling (EnsTM) based Feature Identification techniques for efficient user-modeling and recipe recommendation. It builds on findings in EnsTM to propose a reduced data representation format and a smart user-modeling …
In this era of fake news and political polarization, it is desirable to have a system to enable users to access balanced news content. Current solutions focus on top down, server based approaches to decide whether a news article is fake or biased, and display only trusted news to the end users. In this paper, we follow a different approach to help the users make informed choices about which news they want to read, making users aware in real time of the bias in news articles they were browsing and recommending news articles from other sources on the same topic with different levels of bias. We …
University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Salesforce AI Research（Salesforce人工智能研究院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学网络空间科学与技术学院）；Kunming University of Science and Technology（昆明理工大学）
University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Wilfrid Laurier University（威尔弗里德·劳雷尔大学）；Baidu Inc（百度公司）
A well-informed recommendation framework could not only help users identify their interested items, but also benefit the revenue of various online platforms (e.g., e-commerce, social media). Traditional recommendation models usually assume that only a single type of interaction exists between user and item, and fail to model the multiplex user-item relationships from multi-typed user behavior data, such as page view, add-to-favourite and purchase. While some recent studies propose to capture the dependencies across different types of behaviors, two important challenges have been less explored:…
CoCoB: Adaptive Collaborative Combinatorial Bandits for Online Recommendation
School of Computer Science and Technology, Donghua University（东华大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Shanghai Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Education, East China Normal University（华东师范大学上海人工智能教育研究院）
