Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in generating natural language explanations for recommender systems. However, existing methods often overlook the sequential dynamics of user behavior and rely on evaluation metrics misaligned with practical utility. We propose SELLER (SEquence-aware LLM-based framework for Explainable Recommendation), which integrates explanation generation with utility-aware evaluation. SELLER combines a dual-path encoder-capturing both user behavior and item semantics with a Mixture-of-Experts adapter to align these signals with LLMs. A unified evaluation framework assesses explanations via both textual quality and their effect on recommendation outcomes. Experiments on public benchmarks show that SELLER consistently outperforms prior methods in explanation quality and real-world utility.
Explainable recommendation has attracted much attention from the industry and academic communities. It has shown great potential for improving the recommendation persuasiveness, informativeness and user satisfaction. Despite a lot of promising explainable recommender models have been proposed in the past few years, the evaluation strategies of these models suffer from several limitations. For example, the explanation ground truths are not labeled by real users, the explanations are mostly evaluated based on only one aspect and the evaluation strategies can be hard to unify. To alleviate the ab…
Knowledge graphs (KG) have become increasingly important to endow modern recommender systems with the ability to generate traceable reasoning paths to explain the recommendation process. However, prior research rarely considers the faithfulness of the derived explanations to justify the decision making process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that models and evaluates faithfully explainable recommendation under the framework of KG reasoning. Specifically, we propose neural logic reasoning for explainable recommendation (LOGER) by drawing on interpretable logical rules to g…
Recently, the embedding-based recommendation models (e.g., matrix factorization and deep models) have been prevalent in both academia and industry due to their effectiveness and flexibility. However, they also have such intrinsic limitations as lacking explainability and suffering from data sparsity. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end joint learning framework to get around these limitations without introducing any extra overhead by distilling structured knowledge from a differentiable path-based recommendation model. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed framework can a…
Existing research on fairness-aware recommendation has mainly focused on the quantification of fairness and the development of fair recommendation models, neither of which studies a more substantial problem--identifying the underlying reason of model disparity in recommendation. This information is critical for recommender system designers to understand the intrinsic recommendation mechanism and provides insights on how to improve model fairness to decision makers. Fortunately, with the rapid development of Explainable AI, we can use model explainability to gain insights into model (un)fairnes…
With over 500 million tweets posted per day, in Twitter, it is difficult for Twitter users to discover interesting content from the deluge of uninteresting posts. In this work, we present a novel, explainable, topical recommendation system, that utilizes social annotations, to help Twitter users discover tweets, on topics of their interest. A major challenge in using traditional rating dependent recommendation systems, like collaborative filtering and content based systems, in high volume social networks is that, due to attention scarcity most items do not get any ratings. Additionally, the fa…
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…
The Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN) (e.g., Facebook) have many factors (for instance, ratings, check-in time, etc.) that play a crucial role for the Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendations. Unlike ratings, the reviews can help users to elaborate their opinion and share the extent of consumption experience in terms of the relevant factors of interest (aspects). Though some of the existing recommendation systems have been using the user reviews, most of them are less transparent and non-interpretable. These reasons have induced considerable attention towards explainable and interpretable r…
Although personalized recommendation has been investigated for decades, the wide adoption of Latent Factor Models (LFM) has made the explainability of recommendations a critical issue to both the research community and practical application of recommender systems. For example, in many practical systems the algorithm just provides a personalized item recommendation list to the users, without persuasive personalized explanation about why such an item is recommended while another is not. Unexplainable recommendations introduce negative effects to the trustworthiness of recommender systems, and th…
In fashion recommender systems, each product usually consists of multiple semantic attributes (e.g., sleeves, collar, etc). When making cloth decisions, people usually show preferences for different semantic attributes (e.g., the clothes with v-neck collar). Nevertheless, most previous fashion recommendation models comprehend the clothing images with a global content representation and lack detailed understanding of users' semantic preferences, which usually leads to inferior recommendation performance. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Semantic Attribute Explainable Recommender System (S…
Explainable recommendation attempts to develop models that generate not only high-quality recommendations but also intuitive explanations. The explanations may either be post-hoc or directly come from an explainable model (also called interpretable or transparent model in some contexts). Explainable recommendation tries to address the problem of why: by providing explanations to users or system designers, it helps humans to understand why certain items are recommended by the algorithm, where the human can either be users or system designers. Explainable recommendation helps to improve the tran…
Recommendation system could help the companies to persuade users to visit or consume at a particular place, which was based on many traditional methods such as the set of collaborative filtering algorithms. Most research discusses the model design or feature engineering methods to minimize the root mean square error (RMSE) of rating prediction, but lacks exploring the ways to generate the reasons for recommendations. This paper proposed an integrated neural network based model which integrates rating scores prediction and explainable words generation. Based on the experimental results, this mo…
Recently, research on explainable recommender systems has drawn much attention from both academia and industry, resulting in a variety of explainable models. As a consequence, their evaluation approaches vary from model to model, which makes it quite difficult to compare the explainability of different models. To achieve a standard way of evaluating recommendation explanations, we provide three benchmark datasets for EXplanaTion RAnking (denoted as EXTRA), on which explainability can be measured by ranking-oriented metrics. Constructing such datasets, however, poses great challenges. First, us…
Most previous work on outfit recommendation focuses on designing visual features to enhance recommendations. Existing work neglects user comments of fashion items, which have been proved to be effective in generating explanations along with better recommendation results. We propose a novel neural network framework, neural outfit recommendation (NOR), that simultaneously provides outfit recommendations and generates abstractive comments. NOR consists of two parts: outfit matching and comment generation. For outfit matching, we propose a convolutional neural network with a mutual attention mecha…
Reasoning on knowledge graph (KG) has been studied for explainable recommendation due to it's ability of providing explicit explanations. However, current KG-based explainable recommendation methods unfortunately ignore the temporal information (such as purchase time, recommend time, etc.), which may result in unsuitable explanations. In this work, we propose a novel Time-aware Path reasoning for Recommendation (TPRec for short) method, which leverages the potential of temporal information to offer better recommendation with plausible explanations. First, we present an efficient time-aware int…
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…
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…
Recent work on recommender systems has considered external knowledge graphs as valuable sources of information, not only to produce better recommendations but also to provide explanations of why the recommended items were chosen. Pure rule-based symbolic methods provide a transparent reasoning process over knowledge graph but lack generalization ability to unseen examples, while deep learning models enhance powerful feature representation ability but are hard to interpret. Moreover, direct reasoning over large-scale knowledge graph can be costly due to the huge search space of pathfinding. We …
Explainable recommendation is an important task. Many methods have been proposed which generate explanations from the content and reviews written for items. When review text is unavailable, generating explanations is still a hard problem. In this paper, we illustrate how explanations can be generated in such a scenario by leveraging external knowledge in the form of knowledge graphs. Our method jointly ranks items and knowledge graph entities using a Personalized PageRank procedure to produce recommendations together with their explanations.
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Curtin University（科廷大学）
Counterfactual explanations interpret the recommendation mechanism via exploring how minimal alterations on items or users affect the recommendation decisions. Existing counterfactual explainable approaches face huge search space and their explanations are either action-based (e.g., user click) or aspect-based (i.e., item description). We believe item attribute-based explanations are more intuitive and persuadable for users since they explain by fine-grained item demographic features (e.g., brand). Moreover, counterfactual explanation could enhance recommendations by filtering out negative ite…
State-of-the-art recommender system (RS) mostly rely on complex deep neural network (DNN) model structure, which makes it difficult to provide explanations along with RS decisions. Previous researchers have proved that providing explanations along with recommended items can help users make informed decisions and improve their trust towards the uninterpretable blackbox system. In model-agnostic explainable recommendation, system designers deploy a separate explanation model to take as input from the decision model, and generate explanations to meet the goal of persuasiveness. In this work, we e…
Recommender systems are used in many different applications and contexts, however their main goal can always be summarised as "connecting relevant content to interested users". Personalized recommendation algorithms achieve this goal by first building a profile of the user, either implicitly or explicitly, and then matching items with this profile to find relevant content. The more interpretable the profile and this "matching function" are, the easier it is to provide users with accurate and intuitive explanations, and also to let them interact with the system. Indeed, for a user to see what t…
Images account for a significant part of user decisions in many application scenarios, such as product images in e-commerce, or user image posts in social networks. It is intuitive that user preferences on the visual patterns of image (e.g., hue, texture, color, etc) can be highly personalized, and this provides us with highly discriminative features to make personalized recommendations. Previous work that takes advantage of images for recommendation usually transforms the images into latent representation vectors, which are adopted by a recommendation component to assist personalized user/ite…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Explainable recommendation has shown its great advantages for improving recommendation persuasiveness, user satisfaction, system transparency, among others. A fundamental problem of explainable recommendation is how to evaluate the explanations. In the past few years, various evaluation strategies have been proposed. However, they are scattered in different papers, and there lacks a systematic and detailed comparison between them. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we comprehensively review the previous work, and provide different taxonomies for them according to the evaluation perspectives an…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Wuhan University of Technology（武汉理工大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
Recent advances in path-based explainable recommendation systems have attracted increasing attention thanks to the rich information provided by knowledge graphs. Most existing explainable recommendations only utilize static knowledge graphs and ignore the dynamic user-item evolutions, leading to less convincing and inaccurate explanations. Although there are some works that realize that modelling user's temporal sequential behaviour could boost the performance and explainability of the recommender systems, most of them either only focus on modelling user's sequential interactions within a path…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
There has been growing attention on fairness considerations recently, especially in the context of intelligent decision making systems. Explainable recommendation systems, in particular, may suffer from both explanation bias and performance disparity. In this paper, we analyze different groups of users according to their level of activity, and find that bias exists in recommendation performance between different groups. We show that inactive users may be more susceptible to receiving unsatisfactory recommendations, due to insufficient training data for the inactive users, and that their recomm…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
By providing explanations for users and system designers to facilitate better understanding and decision making, explainable recommendation has been an important research problem. In this paper, we propose Counterfactual Explainable Recommendation (CountER), which takes the insights of counterfactual reasoning from causal inference for explainable recommendation. CountER is able to formulate the complexity and the strength of explanations, and it adopts a counterfactual learning framework to seek simple (low complexity) and effective (high strength) explanations for the model decision. Technic…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Recent recommender systems aim to provide not only accurate recommendations but also explanations that help users understand them better. However, most existing explainable recommendations only consider the importance of content in reviews, such as words or aspects, and ignore the ordering relationship among them. This oversight neglects crucial ordering dimensions in the human decision-making process, leading to suboptimal performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Aspect Order Tree-based (AOTree) explainable recommendation method, inspired by the Order Effects Theory from cognitive an…
Autoencoders are a common building block of Deep Learning architectures, where they are mainly used for representation learning. They have also been successfully used in Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender systems to predict missing ratings. Unfortunately, like all black box machine learning models, they are unable to explain their outputs. Hence, while predictions from an Autoencoder-based recommender system might be accurate, it might not be clear to the user why a recommendation was generated. In this work, we design an explainable recommendation system using an Autoencoder model whose…
Recent research explores incorporating knowledge graphs (KG) into e-commerce recommender systems, not only to achieve better recommendation performance, but more importantly to generate explanations of why particular decisions are made. This can be achieved by explicit KG reasoning, where a model starts from a user node, sequentially determines the next step, and walks towards an item node of potential interest to the user. However, this is challenging due to the huge search space, unknown destination, and sparse signals over the KG, so informative and effective guidance is needed to achieve a…
Selecting the best scientific venue (i.e., conference/journal) for the submission of a research article constitutes a multifaceted challenge. Important aspects to consider are the suitability of research topics, a venue's prestige, and the probability of acceptance. The selection problem is exacerbated through the continuous emergence of additional venues. Previously proposed approaches for supporting authors in this process rely on complex recommender systems, e.g., based on Word2Vec or TextCNN. These, however, often elude an explanation for their recommendations. In this work, we propose an …
Incorporating knowledge graph into recommender systems has attracted increasing attention in recent years. By exploring the interlinks within a knowledge graph, the connectivity between users and items can be discovered as paths, which provide rich and complementary information to user-item interactions. Such connectivity not only reveals the semantics of entities and relations, but also helps to comprehend a user's interest. However, existing efforts have not fully explored this connectivity to infer user preferences, especially in terms of modeling the sequential dependencies within and holi…
Recent advances in personalized recommendation have sparked great interest in the exploitation of rich structured information provided by knowledge graphs. Unlike most existing approaches that only focus on leveraging knowledge graphs for more accurate recommendation, we perform explicit reasoning with knowledge for decision making so that the recommendations are generated and supported by an interpretable causal inference procedure. To this end, we propose a method called Policy-Guided Path Reasoning (PGPR), which couples recommendation and interpretability by providing actual paths in a know…
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Most conversational recommendation approaches are either not explainable, or they require external user's knowledge for explaining or their explanations cannot be applied in real time due to computational limitations. In this work, we present a real time category based conversational recommendation approach, which can provide concise explanations without prior user knowledge being required. We first perform an explainable user model in the form of preferences over the items' categories, and then use the category preferences to recommend items. The user model is performed by applying a BERT-bas…
University of Tennessee Health Science Center（田纳西大学健康科学中心）；Oak Ridge National Laboratory（橡树岭国家实验室）；College of Medicine（医学院）
The study of adverse childhood experiences and their consequences has emerged over the past 20 years. In this study, we aimed to leverage explainable artificial intelligence, and propose a proof-of-concept prototype for a knowledge-driven evidence-based recommendation system to improve surveillance of adverse childhood experiences. We used concepts from an ontology that we have developed to build and train a question-answering agent using the Google DialogFlow engine. In addition to the question-answering agent, the initial prototype includes knowledge graph generation and recommendation compo…
Explainable Recommendation has attracted a lot of attention due to a renewed interest in explainable artificial intelligence. In particular, post-hoc approaches have proved to be the most easily applicable ones to increasingly complex recommendation models, which are then treated as black-boxes. The most recent literature has shown that for post-hoc explanations based on local surrogate models, there are problems related to the robustness of the approach itself. This consideration becomes even more relevant in human-related tasks like recommendation. The explanation also has the arduous task o…
ExplainRec: Towards Explainable Multi-Modal Zero-Shot Recommendation with Preference Attribution and Large Language Models
Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China；Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China hangli\；Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China zehua\；Department of Software \& Microelectronics Peking University Beijing, China xiaofan\；Economic Law School China University of Political Science；School of Computer Science Peking University Beijing, China
