Recent years have witnessed the great successes of embedding-based methods in recommender systems. Despite their decent performance, we argue one potential limitation of these methods -- the embedding magnitude has not been explicitly modulated, which may aggravate popularity bias and training instability, hindering the model from making a good recommendation. It motivates us to leverage the embedding normalization in recommendation. By normalizing user/item embeddings to a specific value, we empirically observe impressive performance gains (9\% on average) on four real-world datasets. Although encouraging, we also reveal a serious limitation when applying normalization in recommendation -- the performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the temperature $\tau$ which controls the scale of the normalized embeddings. To fully foster the merits of the normalization while circumvent its limitation, this work studied on how to adaptively set the proper $\tau$. Towards this end, we first make a comprehensive analyses of $\tau$ to fully understand its role on recommendation. We then accordingly develop an adaptive fine-grained strategy Adap-$\tau$ for the temperature with satisfying four desirable properties including adaptivity, personalized, efficiency and model-agnostic. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposal. The code is available at \url{//github.com/junkangwu/Adap_tau}.
Data in Knowledge Graphs often represents part of the current state of the real world. Thus, to stay up-to-date the graph data needs to be updated frequently. To utilize information from Knowledge Graphs, many state-of-the-art machine learning approaches use embedding techniques. These techniques typically compute an embedding, i.e., vector representations of the nodes as input for the main machine learning algorithm. If a graph update occurs later on -- specifically when nodes are added or removed -- the training has to be done all over again. This is undesirable, because of the time it takes and also because downstream models which were trained with these embeddings have to be retrained if they change significantly. In this paper, we investigate embedding updates that do not require full retraining and evaluate them in combination with various embedding models on real dynamic Knowledge Graphs covering multiple use cases. We study approaches that place newly appearing nodes optimally according to local information, but notice that this does not work well. However, we find that if we continue the training of the old embedding, interleaved with epochs during which we only optimize for the added and removed parts, we obtain good results in terms of typical metrics used in link prediction. This performance is obtained much faster than with a complete retraining and hence makes it possible to maintain embeddings for dynamic Knowledge Graphs.
Invariant approaches have been remarkably successful in tackling the problem of domain generalization, where the objective is to perform inference on data distributions different from those used in training. In our work, we investigate whether it is possible to leverage domain information from the unseen test samples themselves. We propose a domain-adaptive approach consisting of two steps: a) we first learn a discriminative domain embedding from unsupervised training examples, and b) use this domain embedding as supplementary information to build a domain-adaptive model, that takes both the input as well as its domain into account while making predictions. For unseen domains, our method simply uses few unlabelled test examples to construct the domain embedding. This enables adaptive classification on any unseen domain. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various domain generalization benchmarks. In addition, we introduce the first real-world, large-scale domain generalization benchmark, Geo-YFCC, containing 1.1M samples over 40 training, 7 validation, and 15 test domains, orders of magnitude larger than prior work. We show that the existing approaches either do not scale to this dataset or underperform compared to the simple baseline of training a model on the union of data from all training domains. In contrast, our approach achieves a significant improvement.
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Properly handling missing data is a fundamental challenge in recommendation. Most present works perform negative sampling from unobserved data to supply the training of recommender models with negative signals. Nevertheless, existing negative sampling strategies, either static or adaptive ones, are insufficient to yield high-quality negative samples --- both informative to model training and reflective of user real needs. In this work, we hypothesize that item knowledge graph (KG), which provides rich relations among items and KG entities, could be useful to infer informative and factual negative samples. Towards this end, we develop a new negative sampling model, Knowledge Graph Policy Network (KGPolicy), which works as a reinforcement learning agent to explore high-quality negatives. Specifically, by conducting our designed exploration operations, it navigates from the target positive interaction, adaptively receives knowledge-aware negative signals, and ultimately yields a potential negative item to train the recommender. We tested on a matrix factorization (MF) model equipped with KGPolicy, and it achieves significant improvements over both state-of-the-art sampling methods like DNS and IRGAN, and KG-enhanced recommender models like KGAT. Further analyses from different angles provide insights of knowledge-aware sampling. We release the codes and datasets at //github.com/xiangwang1223/kgpolicy.
Collaborative filtering often suffers from sparsity and cold start problems in real recommendation scenarios, therefore, researchers and engineers usually use side information to address the issues and improve the performance of recommender systems. In this paper, we consider knowledge graphs as the source of side information. We propose MKR, a Multi-task feature learning approach for Knowledge graph enhanced Recommendation. MKR is a deep end-to-end framework that utilizes knowledge graph embedding task to assist recommendation task. The two tasks are associated by cross&compress units, which automatically share latent features and learn high-order interactions between items in recommender systems and entities in the knowledge graph. We prove that cross&compress units have sufficient capability of polynomial approximation, and show that MKR is a generalized framework over several representative methods of recommender systems and multi-task learning. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that MKR achieves substantial gains in movie, book, music, and news recommendation, over state-of-the-art baselines. MKR is also shown to be able to maintain a decent performance even if 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.
Providing model-generated explanations in recommender systems is important to user experience. State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the 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 availability of vast amount of data and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors and the knowledge is helpful for providing informed explanations regarding the recommended items. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for explainable recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning framework to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation, and based on the embedded knowledge base, a soft matching algorithm is proposed to generate personalized explanations for the recommended items. Experimental results on real-world e-commerce datasets verified the superior recommendation performance and the explainability power of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
State-of-the-art recommendation algorithms -- especially the 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 neglected recently due to the availability of vast amount of data, and the learning power of many complex models. However, structured knowledge bases exhibit unique advantages in personalized recommendation systems. When the explicit knowledge about users and items is considered for recommendation, the system could provide highly customized recommendations based on users' historical behaviors. A great challenge for using knowledge bases for recommendation is how to integrated large-scale structured and unstructured data, while taking advantage of collaborative filtering for highly accurate performance. Recent achievements on knowledge base embedding sheds light on this problem, which makes it possible to learn user and item representations while preserving the structure of their relationship with external knowledge. In this work, we propose to reason over knowledge base embeddings for personalized recommendation. Specifically, we propose a knowledge base representation learning approach to embed heterogeneous entities for recommendation. Experimental results on real-world dataset verified the superior performance of our approach compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.