Proposed in 2014, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) initiated a fresh interest in generative modelling. They immediately achieved state-of-the-art in image synthesis, image-to-image translation, text-to-image generation, image inpainting and have been used in sciences ranging from medicine to high-energy particle physics. Despite their popularity and ability to learn arbitrary distributions, GAN have not been widely applied in recommender systems (RS). Moreover, only few of the techniques that have introduced GAN in RS have employed them directly as a collaborative filtering (CF) model. In this work we propose a new GAN-based approach that learns user and item latent factors in a matrix factorization setting for the generic top-N recommendation problem. Following the vector-wise GAN training approach for RS introduced by CFGAN, we identify 2 unique issues when utilizing GAN for CF. We propose solutions for both of them by using an autoencoder as discriminator and incorporating an additional loss function for the generator. We evaluate our model, GANMF, through well-known datasets in the RS community and show improvements over traditional CF approaches and GAN-based models. Through an ablation study on the components of GANMF we aim to understand the effects of our architectural choices. Finally, we provide a qualitative evaluation of the matrix factorization performance of GANMF.
相關內容
A knowledge graph (KG) consists of a set of interconnected typed entities and their attributes. Recently, KGs are popularly used as the auxiliary information to enable more accurate, explainable, and diverse user preference recommendations. Specifically, existing KG-based recommendation methods target modeling high-order relations/dependencies from long connectivity user-item interactions hidden in KG. However, most of them ignore the cold-start problems (i.e., user cold-start and item cold-start) of recommendation analytics, which restricts their performance in scenarios when involving new users or new items. Inspired by the success of meta-learning on scarce training samples, we propose a novel meta-learning based framework called MetaKG, which encompasses a collaborative-aware meta learner and a knowledge-aware meta learner, to capture meta users' preference and entities' knowledge for cold-start recommendations. The collaborative-aware meta learner aims to locally aggregate user preferences for each user preference learning task. In contrast, the knowledge-aware meta learner is to globally generalize knowledge representation across different user preference learning tasks. Guided by two meta learners, MetaKG can effectively capture the high-order collaborative relations and semantic representations, which could be easily adapted to cold-start scenarios. Besides, we devise a novel adaptive task scheduler which can adaptively select the informative tasks for meta learning in order to prevent the model from being corrupted by noisy tasks. Extensive experiments on various cold-start scenarios using three real data sets demonstrate that our presented MetaKG outperforms all the existing state-of-the-art competitors in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability.
Recommender systems, a pivotal tool to alleviate the information overload problem, aim to predict user's preferred items from millions of candidates by analyzing observed user-item relations. As for tackling the sparsity and cold start problems encountered by recommender systems, uncovering hidden (indirect) user-item relations by employing side information and knowledge to enrich observed information for the recommendation has been proven promising recently; and its performance is largely determined by the scalability of recommendation models in the face of the high complexity and large scale of side information and knowledge. Making great strides towards efficiently utilizing complex and large-scale data, research into graph embedding techniques is a major topic. Equipping recommender systems with graph embedding techniques contributes to outperforming the conventional recommendation implementing directly based on graph topology analysis and has been widely studied these years. This article systematically retrospects graph embedding-based recommendation from embedding techniques for bipartite graphs, general graphs, and knowledge graphs, and proposes a general design pipeline of that. In addition, comparing several representative graph embedding-based recommendation models with the most common-used conventional recommendation models, on simulations, manifests that the conventional models overall outperform the graph embedding-based ones in predicting implicit user-item interactions, revealing the relative weakness of graph embedding-based recommendation in these tasks. To foster future research, this article proposes constructive suggestions on making a trade-off between graph embedding-based recommendation and the conventional recommendation in different tasks as well as some open questions.
Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a critical role in recommender systems and online advertising. The data used in these applications are multi-field categorical data, where each feature belongs to one field. Field information is proved to be important and there are several works considering fields in their models. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to model the field information effectively and efficiently. The proposed approach is a direct improvement of FwFM, and is named as Field-matrixed Factorization Machines (FmFM, or $FM^2$). We also proposed a new explanation of FM and FwFM within the FmFM framework, and compared it with the FFM. Besides pruning the cross terms, our model supports field-specific variable dimensions of embedding vectors, which acts as soft pruning. We also proposed an efficient way to minimize the dimension while keeping the model performance. The FmFM model can also be optimized further by caching the intermediate vectors, and it only takes thousands of floating-point operations (FLOPs) to make a prediction. Our experiment results show that it can out-perform the FFM, which is more complex. The FmFM model's performance is also comparable to DNN models which require much more FLOPs in runtime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To address the sparsity and cold start problem of collaborative filtering, researchers usually make use of side information, such as social networks or item attributes, to improve recommendation performance. This paper considers the knowledge graph as the source of side information. To address the limitations of existing embedding-based and path-based methods for knowledge-graph-aware recommendation, we propose Ripple Network, an end-to-end framework that naturally incorporates the knowledge graph into recommender systems. Similar to actual ripples propagating on the surface of water, Ripple Network stimulates the propagation of user preferences over the set of knowledge entities by automatically and iteratively extending a user's potential interests along links in the knowledge graph. The multiple "ripples" activated by a user's historically clicked items are thus superposed to form the preference distribution of the user with respect to a candidate item, which could be used for predicting the final clicking probability. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that Ripple Network achieves substantial gains in a variety of scenarios, including movie, book and news recommendation, over several state-of-the-art baselines.
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.
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