Recommender systems (RS), which have been an essential part in a wide range of applications, can be formulated as a matrix completion (MC) problem. To boost the performance of MC, matrix completion with side information, called inductive matrix completion (IMC), was further proposed. In real applications, the factorized version of IMC is more favored due to its efficiency of optimization and implementation. Regarding the factorized version, traditional IMC method can be interpreted as learning an individual representation for each feature, which is independent from each other. Moreover, representations for the same features are shared across all users/items. However, the independent characteristic for features and shared characteristic for the same features across all users/items may limit the expressiveness of the model. The limitation also exists in variants of IMC, such as deep learning based IMC models. To break the limitation, we generalize recent advances of self-attention mechanism to IMC and propose a context-aware model called collaborative self-attention (CSA), which can jointly learn context-aware representations for features and perform inductive matrix completion process. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets from real RS applications demonstrate effectiveness of CSA.
In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which can naturally integrate node information and topological structure, have been demonstrated to be powerful in learning on graph data. These advantages of GNNs provide great potential to advance social recommendation since data in social recommender systems can be represented as user-user social graph and user-item graph; and learning latent factors of users and items is the key. However, building social recommender systems based on GNNs faces challenges. For example, the user-item graph encodes both interactions and their associated opinions; social relations have heterogeneous strengths; users involve in two graphs (e.g., the user-user social graph and the user-item graph). To address the three aforementioned challenges simultaneously, in this paper, we present a novel graph neural network framework (GraphRec) for social recommendations. In particular, we provide a principled approach to jointly capture interactions and opinions in the user-item graph and propose the framework GraphRec, which coherently models two graphs and heterogeneous strengths. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework GraphRec.
We present collaborative similarity embedding (CSE), a unified framework that exploits comprehensive collaborative relations available in a user-item bipartite graph for representation learning and recommendation. In the proposed framework, we differentiate two types of proximity relations: direct proximity and k-th order neighborhood proximity. While learning from the former exploits direct user-item associations observable from the graph, learning from the latter makes use of implicit associations such as user-user similarities and item-item similarities, which can provide valuable information especially when the graph is sparse. Moreover, for improving scalability and flexibility, we propose a sampling technique that is specifically designed to capture the two types of proximity relations. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that CSE yields significantly better performance than state-of-the-art recommendation methods.
In this paper, we propose a novel sequence-aware recommendation model. Our model utilizes self-attention mechanism to infer the item-item relationship from user's historical interactions. With self-attention, it is able to estimate the relative weights of each item in user interaction trajectories to learn better representations for user's transient interests. The model is finally trained in a metric learning framework, taking both short-term and long-term intentions into consideration. Experiments on a wide range of datasets on different domains demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a wide margin.
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.
Model-based methods for recommender systems have been studied extensively in recent years. In systems with large corpus, however, the calculation cost for the learnt model to predict all user-item preferences is tremendous, which makes full corpus retrieval extremely difficult. To overcome the calculation barriers, models such as matrix factorization resort to inner product form (i.e., model user-item preference as the inner product of user, item latent factors) and indexes to facilitate efficient approximate k-nearest neighbor searches. However, it still remains challenging to incorporate more expressive interaction forms between user and item features, e.g., interactions through deep neural networks, because of the calculation cost. In this paper, we focus on the problem of introducing arbitrary advanced models to recommender systems with large corpus. We propose a novel tree-based method which can provide logarithmic complexity w.r.t. corpus size even with more expressive models such as deep neural networks. Our main idea is to predict user interests from coarse to fine by traversing tree nodes in a top-down fashion and making decisions for each user-node pair. We also show that the tree structure can be jointly learnt towards better compatibility with users' interest distribution and hence facilitate both training and prediction. Experimental evaluations with two large-scale real-world datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms traditional methods. Online A/B test results in Taobao display advertising platform also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in production environments.
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.
Combinatorial features are essential for the success of many commercial models. Manually crafting these features usually comes with high cost due to the variety, volume and velocity of raw data in web-scale systems. Factorization based models, which measure interactions in terms of vector product, can learn patterns of combinatorial features automatically and generalize to unseen features as well. With the great success of deep neural works (DNNs) in various fields, recently researchers have proposed several DNN-based factorization model to learn both low- and high-order feature interactions. Despite the powerful ability of learning an arbitrary function from data, plain DNNs generate feature interactions implicitly and at the bit-wise level. In this paper, we propose a novel Compressed Interaction Network (CIN), which aims to generate feature interactions in an explicit fashion and at the vector-wise level. We show that the CIN share some functionalities with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). We further combine a CIN and a classical DNN into one unified model, and named this new model eXtreme Deep Factorization Machine (xDeepFM). On one hand, the xDeepFM is able to learn certain bounded-degree feature interactions explicitly; on the other hand, it can learn arbitrary low- and high-order feature interactions implicitly. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets. Our results demonstrate that xDeepFM outperforms state-of-the-art models. We have released the source code of xDeepFM at //github.com/Leavingseason/xDeepFM.
Recommender systems are one of the most successful applications of data mining and machine learning technology in practice. Academic research in the field is historically often based on the matrix completion problem formulation, where for each user-item-pair only one interaction (e.g., a rating) is considered. In many application domains, however, multiple user-item interactions of different types can be recorded over time. And, a number of recent works have shown that this information can be used to build richer individual user models and to discover additional behavioral patterns that can be leveraged in the recommendation process. In this work we review existing works that consider information from such sequentially-ordered user- item interaction logs in the recommendation process. Based on this review, we propose a categorization of the corresponding recommendation tasks and goals, summarize existing algorithmic solutions, discuss methodological approaches when benchmarking what we call sequence-aware recommender systems, and outline open challenges in the area.
In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded state-of-the-art performance on several tasks. Although some recent works have focused on combining deep learning with recommendation, we highlight three issues of existing works. First, most works perform deep content feature learning and resort to matrix factorization, which cannot effectively model the highly complex user-item interaction function. Second, due to the difficulty on training deep neural networks, existing models utilize a shallow architecture, and thus limit the expressive potential of deep learning. Third, neural network models are easy to overfit on the implicit setting, because negative interactions are not taken into account. To tackle these issues, we present a generic recommender framework called Neural Collaborative Autoencoder (NCAE) to perform collaborative filtering, which works well for both explicit feedback and implicit feedback. NCAE can effectively capture the relationship between interactions via a non-linear matrix factorization process. To optimize the deep architecture of NCAE, we develop a three-stage pre-training mechanism that combines supervised and unsupervised feature learning. Moreover, to prevent overfitting on the implicit setting, we propose an error reweighting module and a sparsity-aware data-augmentation strategy. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that NCAE can significantly advance the state-of-the-art.
Recommender System (RS) is a hot area where artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be effectively applied to improve performance. Since the well-known Netflix Challenge, collaborative filtering (CF) has become the most popular and effective recommendation method. Despite their success in CF, various AI techniques still have to face the data sparsity and cold start problems. Previous works tried to solve these two problems by utilizing auxiliary information, such as social connections among users and meta-data of items. However, they process different types of information separately, leading to information loss. In this work, we propose to utilize Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), which is a natural and general representation of different types of data, to enhance CF-based recommending methods. HIN-based recommender systems face two problems: how to represent high-level semantics for recommendation and how to fuse the heterogeneous information to recommend. To address these problems, we propose to applying meta-graph to HIN-based RS and solve the information fusion problem with a "matrix factorization (MF) + factorization machine (FM)" framework. For the "MF" part, we obtain user-item similarity matrices from each meta-graph and adopt low-rank matrix approximation to get latent features for both users and items. For the "FM" part, we propose to apply FM with Group lasso (FMG) on the obtained features to simultaneously predict missing ratings and select useful meta-graphs. Experimental results on two large real-world datasets, i.e., Amazon and Yelp, show that our proposed approach is better than that of the state-of-the-art FM and other HIN-based recommending methods.