Large language models (LLMs) have recently received significant attention for their exceptional capabilities. Despite extensive efforts in developing general-purpose LLMs that can be utilized in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, there has been less research exploring their potential in recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named PALR, which aiming to combine user history behaviors (such as clicks, purchases, ratings, etc.) with LLMs to generate user preferred items. Specifically, we first use user/item interactions as guidance for candidate retrieval. Then we adopt a LLM-based ranking model to generate recommended items. Unlike existing approaches that typically adopt general-purpose LLMs for zero/few-shot recommendation testing or training on small-sized language models (with less than 1 billion parameters), which cannot fully elicit LLMs' reasoning abilities and leverage rich item side parametric knowledge, we fine-tune a 7 billion parameters LLM for the ranking purpose. This model takes retrieval candidates in natural language format as input, with instruction which explicitly asking to select results from input candidates during inference. Our experimental results demonstrate that our solution outperforms state-of-the-art models on various sequential recommendation tasks.
Recommendation systems have witnessed significant advancements and have been widely used over the past decades. However, most traditional recommendation methods are task-specific and therefore lack efficient generalization ability. Recently, the emergence of ChatGPT has significantly advanced NLP tasks by enhancing the capabilities of conversational models. Nonetheless, the application of ChatGPT in the recommendation domain has not been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we employ ChatGPT as a general-purpose recommendation model to explore its potential for transferring extensive linguistic and world knowledge acquired from large-scale corpora to recommendation scenarios. Specifically, we design a set of prompts and evaluate ChatGPT's performance on five recommendation scenarios. Unlike traditional recommendation methods, we do not fine-tune ChatGPT during the entire evaluation process, relying only on the prompts themselves to convert recommendation tasks into natural language tasks. Further, we explore the use of few-shot prompting to inject interaction information that contains user potential interest to help ChatGPT better understand user needs and interests. Comprehensive experimental results on Amazon Beauty dataset show that ChatGPT has achieved promising results in certain tasks and is capable of reaching the baseline level in others. We conduct human evaluations on two explainability-oriented tasks to more accurately evaluate the quality of contents generated by different models. And the human evaluations show ChatGPT can truly understand the provided information and generate clearer and more reasonable results. We hope that our study can inspire researchers to further explore the potential of language models like ChatGPT to improve recommendation performance and contribute to the advancement of the recommendation systems field.
Recommender systems have been widely applied in different real-life scenarios to help us find useful information. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) based recommender systems have become an emerging research topic. It often surpasses traditional recommendation models even most deep learning-based methods, owing to its interactive nature and autonomous learning ability. Nevertheless, there are various challenges of RL when applying in recommender systems. Toward this end, we firstly provide a thorough overview, comparisons, and summarization of RL approaches for five typical recommendation scenarios, following three main categories of RL: value-function, policy search, and Actor-Critic. Then, we systematically analyze the challenges and relevant solutions on the basis of existing literature. Finally, under discussion for open issues of RL and its limitations of recommendation, we highlight some potential research directions in this field.
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 important factor for the over-smoothing problem in recommendation, that is, high-order neighboring users with no common interests of a user can be also involved in the user's embedding learning in the graph convolution operation. As a result, the multi-layer graph convolution will make users with dissimilar interests have similar embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel Interest-aware Message-Passing GCN (IMP-GCN) recommendation model, which performs high-order graph convolution inside subgraphs. The subgraph consists of users with similar interests and their interacted items. To form the subgraphs, we design an unsupervised subgraph generation module, which can effectively identify users with common interests by exploiting both user feature and graph structure. To this end, our model can avoid propagating negative information from high-order neighbors into embedding learning. Experimental results on three large-scale benchmark datasets show that our model can gain performance improvement by stacking more layers and outperform the state-of-the-art GCN-based recommendation models significantly.
Recently, neural networks have been widely used in e-commerce recommender systems, owing to the rapid development of deep learning. We formalize the recommender system as a sequential recommendation problem, intending to predict the next items that the user might be interacted with. Recent works usually give an overall embedding from a user's behavior sequence. However, a unified user embedding cannot reflect the user's multiple interests during a period. In this paper, we propose a novel controllable multi-interest framework for the sequential recommendation, called ComiRec. Our multi-interest module captures multiple interests from user behavior sequences, which can be exploited for retrieving candidate items from the large-scale item pool. These items are then fed into an aggregation module to obtain the overall recommendation. The aggregation module leverages a controllable factor to balance the recommendation accuracy and diversity. We conduct experiments for the sequential recommendation on two real-world datasets, Amazon and Taobao. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models. Our framework has also been successfully deployed on the offline Alibaba distributed cloud platform.
With the explosion of online news, personalized news recommendation becomes increasingly important for online news platforms to help their users find interesting information. Existing news recommendation methods achieve personalization by building accurate news representations from news content and user representations from their direct interactions with news (e.g., click), while ignoring the high-order relatedness between users and news. Here we propose a news recommendation method which can enhance the representation learning of users and news by modeling their relatedness in a graph setting. In our method, users and news are both viewed as nodes in a bipartite graph constructed from historical user click behaviors. For news representations, a transformer architecture is first exploited to build news semantic representations. Then we combine it with the information from neighbor news in the graph via a graph attention network. For user representations, we not only represent users from their historically clicked news, but also attentively incorporate the representations of their neighbor users in the graph. Improved performances on a large-scale real-world dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
To solve the information explosion problem and enhance user experience in various online applications, recommender systems have been developed to model users preferences. Although numerous efforts have been made toward more personalized recommendations, recommender systems still suffer from several challenges, such as data sparsity and cold start. In recent years, generating recommendations with the knowledge graph as side information has attracted considerable interest. Such an approach can not only alleviate the abovementioned issues for a more accurate recommendation, but also provide explanations for recommended items. In this paper, we conduct a systematical survey of knowledge graph-based recommender systems. We collect recently published papers in this field and summarize them from two perspectives. On the one hand, we investigate the proposed algorithms by focusing on how the papers utilize the knowledge graph for accurate and explainable recommendation. On the other hand, we introduce datasets used in these works. Finally, we propose several potential research directions in this field.
This paper proposes a recommender system to alleviate the cold-start problem that can estimate user preferences based on only a small number of items. To identify a user's preference in the cold state, existing recommender systems, such as Netflix, initially provide items to a user; we call those items evidence candidates. Recommendations are then made based on the items selected by the user. Previous recommendation studies have two limitations: (1) the users who consumed a few items have poor recommendations and (2) inadequate evidence candidates are used to identify user preferences. We propose a meta-learning-based recommender system called MeLU to overcome these two limitations. From meta-learning, which can rapidly adopt new task with a few examples, MeLU can estimate new user's preferences with a few consumed items. In addition, we provide an evidence candidate selection strategy that determines distinguishing items for customized preference estimation. We validate MeLU with two benchmark datasets, and the proposed model reduces at least 5.92% mean absolute error than two comparative models on the datasets. We also conduct a user study experiment to verify the evidence selection strategy.
Knowledge graphs capture structured information and relations between a set of entities or items. As such they represent an attractive source of information that could help improve recommender systems. However existing approaches in this domain rely on manual feature engineering and do not allow for end-to-end training. Here we propose knowledge-aware graph neural networks with label smoothness regularization to provide better recommendations. Conceptually, our approach computes user-specific item embeddings by first applying a trainable function that identifies important knowledge graph relationships for a given user. This way we transform the knowledge graph into a user-specific weighted graph and then applies a graph neural network to compute personalized item embeddings. To provide better inductive bias, we use label smoothness, which assumes that adjacent items in the knowledge graph are likely to have similar user relevance labels/scores. Label smoothness provides regularization over edge weights and we prove that it is equivalent to a label propagation scheme on a graph. Finally, we combine knowledge-aware graph neural networks and label smoothness and present the unified model. Experiment results show that our method outperforms strong baselines in four datasets. It also achieves strong performance in the scenario where user-item interactions are sparse.
Many current applications use recommendations in order to modify the natural user behavior, such as to increase the number of sales or the time spent on a website. This results in a gap between the final recommendation objective and the classical setup where recommendation candidates are evaluated by their coherence with past user behavior, by predicting either the missing entries in the user-item matrix, or the most likely next event. To bridge this gap, we optimize a recommendation policy for the task of increasing the desired outcome versus the organic user behavior. We show this is equivalent to learning to predict recommendation outcomes under a fully random recommendation policy. To this end, we propose a new domain adaptation algorithm that learns from logged data containing outcomes from a biased recommendation policy and predicts recommendation outcomes according to random exposure. We compare our method against state-of-the-art factorization methods, in addition to new approaches of causal recommendation and show significant improvements.
Recommender systems are widely used in big information-based companies such as Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Netflix. A recommender system deals with the problem of information overload by filtering important information fragments according to users' preferences. In light of the increasing success of deep learning, recent studies have proved the benefits of using deep learning in various recommendation tasks. However, most proposed techniques only aim to target individuals, which cannot be efficiently applied in group recommendation. In this paper, we propose a deep learning architecture to solve the group recommendation problem. On the one hand, as different individual preferences in a group necessitate preference trade-offs in making group recommendations, it is essential that the recommendation model can discover substitutes among user behaviors. On the other hand, it has been observed that a user as an individual and as a group member behaves differently. To tackle such problems, we propose using an attention mechanism to capture the impact of each user in a group. Specifically, our model automatically learns the influence weight of each user in a group and recommends items to the group based on its members' weighted preferences. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets. Our model significantly outperforms baseline methods and shows promising results in applying deep learning to the group recommendation problem.