论文周报 | 推荐系统领域最新研究进展
本文精选了上周（0425-0501）最新发布的27篇推荐系统相关论文，方向主要包括协同过滤推荐[17,19,24]、POI推荐[4]、去偏推荐[5,18]、基于对比学习的推荐[6,17,18]、基于图的推荐[9,10,17,26]、公平性推荐[11]、联邦推荐[12,20]、序列化推荐[7,8,13,14,15,16]等的推荐算法，应用涵盖会话推荐、序列推荐以及跨市场推荐等。以下整理了论文标题以及摘要，如感兴趣可移步原文精读。
1. DraftRec: Personalized Draft Recommendation for Winning in Multi-Player Online Battle Arena Games
2. A Practical Two-stage Ranking Framework for Cross-market Recommendation
3. Application of WGAN-GP in recommendation and Questioning the relevance of GAN-based approaches
4. Empowering Next POI Recommendation with Multi-Relational Modeling
5. Cross Pairwise Ranking for Unbiased Item Recommendation
6. A Review-aware Graph Contrastive Learning Framework for Recommendation
7. Determinantal Point Process Likelihoods for Sequential Recommendation
8. MLP4Rec: A Pure MLP Architecture for Sequential Recommendations
9. Less is More: Reweighting Important Spectral Graph Features for Recommendation
10. Regulating Group Exposure for Item Providers in Recommendation
11. Explainable Fairness in Recommendation
12. On-Device Next-Item Recommendation with Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation
13. CORE: Simple and Effective Session-based Recommendation within Consistent Representation Space
14. Decoupled Side Information Fusion for Sequential Recommendation
15. Exploiting Session Information in BERT-based Session-aware Sequential Recommendation
16. DACSR: Dual-Aggregation End-to-End Calibrated Sequential Recommendation
17. Hypergraph Contrastive Collaborative Filtering
18. Trading Hard Negatives and True Negatives: A Debiased Contrastive Collaborative Filtering Approach
19. Broad Recommender System: An Efficient Nonlinear Collaborative Filtering Approach
20. Poisoning Deep Learning based Recommender Model in Federated Learning Scenarios
21. AutoLossGen: Automatic Loss Function Generation for Recommender Systems
22. Generating Self-Serendipity Preference in Recommender Systems for Addressing Cold Start Problems
23. Estimating and Penalizing Induced Preference Shifts in Recommender Systems
24. Broad Recommender System: An Efficient Nonlinear Collaborative Filtering Approach
25. Long-run User Value Optimization in Recommender Systems through Content Creation Modeling
26. Post Processing Recommender Systems with Knowledge Graphs for Recency, Popularity, and Diversity of Explanations
27. ReLoop: A Self-Correction Continual Learning Loop for Recommender Systems
1. DraftRec: Personalized Draft Recommendation for Winning in Multi-Player Online Battle Arena Games
Hojoon Lee, Dongyoon Hwang, Hyunseung Kim, Byungkun Lee, Jaegul Choo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12750
This paper presents a personalized character recommendation system for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games which are considered as one of the most popular online video game genres around the world. When playing MOBA games, players go through a draft stage, where they alternately select a virtual character to play. When drafting, players select characters by not only considering their character preferences, but also the synergy and competence of their team's character combination. However, the complexity of drafting induces difficulties for beginners to choose the appropriate characters based on the characters of their team while considering their own champion preferences. To alleviate this problem, we propose DraftRec, a novel hierarchical model which recommends characters by considering each player's champion preferences and the interaction between the players. DraftRec consists of two networks: the player network and the match network. The player network captures the individual player's champion preference, and the match network integrates the complex relationship between the players and their respective champions. We train and evaluate our model from a manually collected 280,000 matches of League of Legends and a publicly available 50,000 matches of Dota2. Empirically, our method achieved state-of-the-art performance in character recommendation and match outcome prediction task. Furthermore, a comprehensive user survey confirms that DraftRec provides convincing and satisfying recommendations. Our code and dataset are available at
2. A Practical Two-stage Ranking Framework for Cross-market Recommendation
Zeyuan Chen, He Wang, Xiangyu Zhu, Haiyan Wu, Congcong Gu, Shumeng Liu, Jinchao Huang, Wei Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12682
Cross-market recommendation aims to recommend products to users in a resource-scarce target market by leveraging user behaviors from similar rich-resource markets, which is crucial for E-commerce companies but receives less research attention. In this paper, we present our detailed solution adopted in the cross-market recommendation contest, i.e., WSDM CUP 2022. To better utilize collaborative signals and similarities between target and source markets, we carefully consider multiple features as well as stacking learning models consisting of deep graph recommendation models (Graph Neural Network, DeepWalk, etc.) and traditional recommendation models (ItemCF, UserCF, Swing, etc.). Furthermore, We adopt tree-based ensembling methods, e.g., LightGBM, which show superior performance in prediction task to generate final results. We conduct comprehensive experiments on the XMRec dataset, verifying the effectiveness of our model. The proposed solution of our team WSDM_Coggle_ is selected as the second place submission.
3. Application of WGAN-GP in recommendation and Questioning the relevance of GAN-based approaches
Hichem Ammar Khodja, Oussama Boudjeniba
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12527
Many neural-based recommender systems were proposed in recent years and part of them used Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to model user-item interactions. However, the exploration of Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) on recommendation has received relatively less scrutiny. In this paper, we focus on two questions: 1- Can we successfully apply WGAN-GP on recommendation and does this approach give an advantage compared to the best GAN models? 2- Are GAN-based recommender systems relevant? To answer the first question, we propose a recommender system based on WGAN-GP called CFWGAN-GP which is founded on a previous model (CFGAN). We successfully applied our method on real-world datasets on the top-k recommendation task and the empirical results show that it is competitive with state-of-the-art GAN approaches, but we found no evidence of significant advantage of using WGAN-GP instead of the original GAN, at least from the accuracy point of view. As for the second question, we conduct a simple experiment in which we show that a well-tuned conceptually simpler method outperforms GAN-based models by a considerable margin, questioning the use of such models.
4. Empowering Next POI Recommendation with Multi-Relational Modeling
Zheng Huang, Jing Ma, Yushun Dong, Natasha Zhang Foutz, Jundong Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12288
With the wide adoption of mobile devices and web applications, location-based social networks (LBSNs) offer large-scale individual-level location-related activities and experiences. Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is one of the most important tasks in LBSNs, aiming to make personalized recommendations of next suitable locations to users by discovering preferences from users' historical activities. Noticeably, LBSNs have offered unparalleled access to abundant heterogeneous relational information about users and POIs (including user-user social relations, such as families or colleagues; and user-POI visiting relations). Such relational information holds great potential to facilitate the next POI recommendation. However, most existing methods either focus on merely the user-POI visits, or handle different relations based on over-simplified assumptions while neglecting relational heterogeneities. To fill these critical voids, we propose a novel framework, MEMO, which effectively utilizes the heterogeneous relations with a multi-network representation learning module, and explicitly incorporates the inter-temporal user-POI mutual influence with the coupled recurrent neural networks. Extensive experiments on real-world LBSN data validate the superiority of our framework over the state-of-the-art next POI recommendation methods.
5. Cross Pairwise Ranking for Unbiased Item Recommendation
Qi Wan, Xiangnan He, Xiang Wang, Jiancan Wu, Wei Guo, Ruiming Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12176
Most recommender systems optimize the model on observed interaction data, which is affected by the previous exposure mechanism and exhibits many biases like popularity bias. The loss functions, such as the mostly used pointwise Binary Cross-Entropy and pairwise Bayesian Personalized Ranking, are not designed to consider the biases in observed data. As a result, the model optimized on the loss would inherit the data biases, or even worse, amplify the biases. For example, a few popular items take up more and more exposure opportunities, severely hurting the recommendation quality on niche items -- known as the notorious Mathew effect. In this work, we develop a new learning paradigm named Cross Pairwise Ranking (CPR) that achieves unbiased recommendation without knowing the exposure mechanism. Distinct from inverse propensity scoring (IPS), we change the loss term of a sample -- we innovatively sample multiple observed interactions once and form the loss as the combination of their predictions. We prove in theory that this way offsets the influence of user/item propensity on the learning, removing the influence of data biases caused by the exposure mechanism. Advantageous to IPS, our proposed CPR ensures unbiased learning for each training instance without the need of setting the propensity scores. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of CPR over state-of-the-art debiasing solutions in both model generalization and training efficiency. The codes are available at
6. A Review-aware Graph Contrastive Learning Framework for Recommendation
Jie Shuai, Kun Zhang, Le Wu, Peijie Sun, Richang Hong, Meng Wang, Yong Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12063
Most modern recommender systems predict users preferences with two components: user and item embedding learning, followed by the user-item interaction modeling. By utilizing the auxiliary review information accompanied with user ratings, many of the existing review-based recommendation models enriched user/item embedding learning ability with historical reviews or better modeled user-item interactions with the help of available user-item target reviews. Though significant progress has been made, we argue that current solutions for review-based recommendation suffer from two drawbacks. First, as review-based recommendation can be naturally formed as a user-item bipartite graph with edge features from corresponding user-item reviews, how to better exploit this unique graph structure for recommendation? Second, while most current models suffer from limited user behaviors, can we exploit the unique self-supervised signals in the review-aware graph to guide two recommendation components better? To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Review-aware Graph Contrastive Learning (RGCL) framework for review-based recommendation. Specifically, we first construct a review-aware user-item graph with feature-enhanced edges from reviews, where each edge feature is composed of both the user-item rating and the corresponding review semantics. This graph with feature-enhanced edges can help attentively learn each neighbor node weight for user and item representation learning. After that, we design two additional contrastive learning tasks (i.e., Node Discrimination and Edge Discrimination) to provide self-supervised signals for the two components in recommendation process. Finally, extensive experiments over five benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed RGCL compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.
7. Determinantal Point Process Likelihoods for Sequential Recommendation
Yuli Liu, Christian Walder, Lexing Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11562
Sequential recommendation is a popular task in academic research and close to real-world application scenarios, where the goal is to predict the next action(s) of the user based on his/her previous sequence of actions. In the training process of recommender systems, the loss function plays an essential role in guiding the optimization of recommendation models to generate accurate suggestions for users. However, most existing sequential recommendation techniques focus on designing algorithms or neural network architectures, and few efforts have been made to tailor loss functions that fit naturally into the practical application scenario of sequential recommender systems.
8. MLP4Rec: A Pure MLP Architecture for Sequential Recommendations
Muyang Li, Xiangyu Zhao, Chuan Lyu, Minghao Zhao, Runze Wu, Ruocheng Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11510
Self-attention models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in sequential recommender systems by capturing the sequential dependencies among user-item interactions. However, they rely on positional embeddings to retain the sequential information, which may break the semantics of item embeddings. In addition, most existing works assume that such sequential dependencies exist solely in the item embeddings, but neglect their existence among the item features. In this work, we propose a novel sequential recommender system (MLP4Rec) based on the recent advances of MLP-based architectures, which is naturally sensitive to the order of items in a sequence. To be specific, we develop a tri-directional fusion scheme to coherently capture sequential, cross-channel and cross-feature correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MLP4Rec over various representative baselines upon two benchmark datasets. The simple architecture of MLP4Rec also leads to the linear computational complexity as well as much fewer model parameters than existing self-attention methods.
9. Less is More: Reweighting Important Spectral Graph Features for Recommendation
Shaowen Peng, Kazunari Sugiyama, Tsunenori Mine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11346
As much as Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have shown tremendous success in recommender systems and collaborative filtering (CF), the mechanism of how they, especially the core components (\textit{i.e.,} neighborhood aggregation) contribute to recommendation has not been well studied. To unveil the effectiveness of GCNs for recommendation, we first analyze them in a spectral perspective and discover two important findings: (1) only a small portion of spectral graph features that emphasize the neighborhood smoothness and difference contribute to the recommendation accuracy, whereas most graph information can be considered as noise that even reduces the performance, and (2) repetition of the neighborhood aggregation emphasizes smoothed features and filters out noise information in an ineffective way. Based on the two findings above, we propose a new GCN learning scheme for recommendation by replacing neihgborhood aggregation with a simple yet effective Graph Denoising Encoder (GDE), which acts as a band pass filter to capture important graph features. We show that our proposed method alleviates the over-smoothing and is comparable to an indefinite-layer GCN that can take any-hop neighborhood into consideration. Finally, we dynamically adjust the gradients over the negative samples to expedite model training without introducing additional complexity. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets show that our proposed method not only outperforms state-of-the-arts but also achieves 12x speedup over LightGCN.
10. Regulating Group Exposure for Item Providers in Recommendation
Mirko Marras, Ludovico Boratto, Guilherme Ramos, Gianni Fenu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11243
Engaging all content providers, including newcomers or minority demographic groups, is crucial for online platforms to keep growing and working. Hence, while building recommendation services, the interests of those providers should be valued. In this paper, we consider providers as grouped based on a common characteristic in settings in which certain provider groups have low representation of items in the catalog and, thus, in the user interactions. Then, we envision a scenario wherein platform owners seek to control the degree of exposure to such groups in the recommendation process. To support this scenario, we rely on disparate exposure measures that characterize the gap between the share of recommendations given to groups and the target level of exposure pursued by the platform owners. We then propose a re-ranking procedure that ensures desired levels of exposure are met. Experiments show that, while supporting certain groups of providers by rendering them with the target exposure, beyond-accuracy objectives experience significant gains with negligible impact in recommendation utility.
11. Explainable Fairness in Recommendation
Yingqiang Ge, Juntao Tan, Yan Zhu, Yinglong Xia, Jiebo Luo, Shuchang Liu, Zuohui Fu, Shijie Geng, Zelong Li, Yongfeng Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11159
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)fairness. In this paper, we study the problem of explainable fairness, which helps to gain insights about why a system is fair or unfair, and guides the design of fair recommender systems with a more informed and unified methodology. Particularly, we focus on a common setting with feature-aware recommendation and exposure unfairness, but the proposed explainable fairness framework is general and can be applied to other recommendation settings and fairness definitions. We propose a Counterfactual Explainable Fairness framework, called CEF, which generates explanations about model fairness that can improve the fairness without significantly hurting the performance.The CEF framework formulates an optimization problem to learn the "minimal" change of the input features that changes the recommendation results to a certain level of fairness. Based on the counterfactual recommendation result of each feature, we calculate an explainability score in terms of the fairness-utility trade-off to rank all the feature-based explanations, and select the top ones as fairness explanations.
12. On-Device Next-Item Recommendation with Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation
Xin Xia, Hongzhi Yin, Junliang Yu, Qinyong Wang, Guandong Xu, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11091
Modern recommender systems operate in a fully server-based fashion. To cater to millions of users, the frequent model maintaining and the high-speed processing for concurrent user requests are required, which comes at the cost of a huge carbon footprint. Meanwhile, users need to upload their behavior data even including the immediate environmental context to the server, raising the public concern about privacy. On-device recommender systems circumvent these two issues with cost-conscious settings and local inference. However, due to the limited memory and computing resources, on-device recommender systems are confronted with two fundamental challenges: (1) how to reduce the size of regular models to fit edge devices? (2) how to retain the original capacity? Previous research mostly adopts tensor decomposition techniques to compress the regular recommendation model with limited compression ratio so as to avoid drastic performance degradation. In this paper, we explore ultra-compact models for next-item recommendation, by loosing the constraint of dimensionality consistency in tensor decomposition. Meanwhile, to compensate for the capacity loss caused by compression, we develop a self-supervised knowledge distillation framework which enables the compressed model (student) to distill the essential information lying in the raw data, and improves the long-tail item recommendation through an embedding-recombination strategy with the original model (teacher). The extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that, with 30x model size reduction, the compressed model almost comes with no accuracy loss, and even outperforms its uncompressed counterpart in most cases.
13. CORE: Simple and Effective Session-based Recommendation within Consistent Representation Space
Yupeng Hou, Binbin Hu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Wayne Xin Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11067
Session-based Recommendation (SBR) refers to the task of predicting the next item based on short-term user behaviors within an anonymous session. However, session embedding learned by a non-linear encoder is usually not in the same representation space as item embeddings, resulting in the inconsistent prediction issue while recommending items. To address this issue, we propose a simple and effective framework named CORE, which can unify the representation space for both the encoding and decoding processes. Firstly, we design a representation-consistent encoder that takes the linear combination of input item embeddings as session embedding, guaranteeing that sessions and items are in the same representation space. Besides, we propose a robust distance measuring method to prevent overfitting of embeddings in the consistent representation space. Extensive experiments conducted on five public real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. The code is available at:
14. Decoupled Side Information Fusion for Sequential Recommendation
Yueqi Xie, Peilin Zhou, Sunghun Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11046
Side information fusion for sequential recommendation (SR) aims to effectively leverage various side information to enhance the performance of next-item prediction. Most state-of-the-art methods build on self-attention networks and focus on exploring various solutions to integrate the item embedding and side information embeddings before the attention layer. However, our analysis shows that the early integration of various types of embeddings limits the expressiveness of attention matrices due to a rank bottleneck and constrains the flexibility of gradients. Also, it involves mixed correlations among the different heterogeneous information resources, which brings extra disturbance to attention calculation. Motivated by this, we propose Decoupled Side Information Fusion for Sequential Recommendation (DIF-SR), which moves the side information from the input to the attention layer and decouples the attention calculation of various side information and item representation. We theoretically and empirically show that the proposed solution allows higher-rank attention matrices and flexible gradients to enhance the modeling capacity of side information fusion. Also, auxiliary attribute predictors are proposed to further activate the beneficial interaction between side information and item representation learning. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed solution stably outperforms state-of-the-art SR models. Further studies show that our proposed solution can be readily incorporated into current attention-based SR models and significantly boost performance. Our source code is available at
15. Exploiting Session Information in BERT-based Session-aware Sequential Recommendation
Jinseok Seol, Youngrok Ko, Sang-goo Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10851
In recommendation systems, utilizing the user interaction history as sequential information has resulted in great performance improvement. However, in many online services, user interactions are commonly grouped by sessions that presumably share preferences, which requires a different approach from ordinary sequence representation techniques. To this end, sequence representation models with a hierarchical structure or various viewpoints have been developed but with a rather complex network structure. In this paper, we propose three methods to improve recommendation performance by exploiting session information while minimizing additional parameters in a BERT-based sequential recommendation model: using session tokens, adding session segment embeddings, and a time-aware self-attention. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods through experiments on widely used recommendation datasets.
16. DACSR: Dual-Aggregation End-to-End Calibrated Sequential Recommendation
Jiayi Chen, Wen Wu, Liye Shi, Wei Zheng, Liang He
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10796
Recent years have witnessed the progress of sequential recommendation in accurately predicting users' future behaviors. However, only persuading accuracy leads to the risk of filter bubbles where recommenders only focus on users' main interest areas. Different from other studies which improves diversity or coverage, we investigate the calibration in sequential recommendation. However, existing calibrated methods followed a post-processing paradigm, which costs more computation time and sacrifices the recommendation accuracy. To this end, we propose an end-to-end framework to provide both accurate and calibrated recommendations. We propose a loss function to measure the divergence of distributions between recommendation lists and historical behaviors for sequential recommendation framework. In addition, we design a dual-aggregation model which extract information from two individual sequence encoders with different objectives to further improve the recommendation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our model.
17. Hypergraph Contrastive Collaborative Filtering
Lianghao Xia, Chao Huang, Yong Xu, Jiashu Zhao, Dawei Yin, Jimmy Xiangji Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12200
Collaborative Filtering (CF) has emerged as fundamental paradigms for parameterizing users and items into latent representation space, with their correlative patterns from interaction data. Among various CF techniques, the development of GNN-based recommender systems, e.g., PinSage and LightGCN, has offered the state-of-the-art performance. However, two key challenges have not been well explored in existing solutions: i) The over-smoothing effect with deeper graph-based CF architecture, may cause the indistinguishable user representations and degradation of recommendation results. ii) The supervision signals (i.e., user-item interactions) are usually scarce and skewed distributed in reality, which limits the representation power of CF paradigms. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new self-supervised recommendation framework Hypergraph Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (HCCF) to jointly capture local and global collaborative relations with a hypergraph-enhanced cross-view contrastive learning architecture. In particular, the designed hypergraph structure learning enhances the discrimination ability of GNN-based CF paradigm, so as to comprehensively capture the complex high-order dependencies among users. Additionally, our HCCF model effectively integrates the hypergraph structure encoding with self-supervised learning to reinforce the representation quality of recommender systems, based on the hypergraph-enhanced self-discrimination. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over various state-of-the-art recommendation methods, and the robustness against sparse user interaction data. Our model implementation codes are available at
18. Trading Hard Negatives and True Negatives: A Debiased Contrastive Collaborative Filtering Approach
Chenxiao Yang, Qitian Wu, Jipeng Jin, Xiaofeng Gao, Junwei Pan, Guihai Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11752
Collaborative filtering (CF), as a standard method for recommendation with implicit feedback, tackles a semi-supervised learning problem where most interaction data are unobserved. Such a nature makes existing approaches highly rely on mining negatives for providing correct training signals. However, mining proper negatives is not a free lunch, encountering with a tricky trade-off between mining informative hard negatives and avoiding false ones. We devise a new approach named as Hardness-Aware Debiased Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (HDCCF) to resolve the dilemma. It could sufficiently explore hard negatives from two-fold aspects: 1) adaptively sharpening the gradients of harder instances through a set-wise objective, and 2) implicitly leveraging item/user frequency information with a new sampling strategy. To circumvent false negatives, we develop a principled approach to improve the reliability of negative instances and prove that the objective is an unbiased estimation of sampling from the true negative distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over existing CF models and hard negative mining methods.
19. Broad Recommender System: An Efficient Nonlinear Collaborative Filtering Approach
Ling Huang, Can-Rong Guan, Zhen-Wei Huang, Yuefang Gao, Yingjie Kuang, Chang-Dong Wang, C. L. Philip Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11602
Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely introduced into Collaborative Filtering (CF) to produce more accurate recommendation results due to their capability of capturing the complex nonlinear relationships between items and users.However, the DNNs-based models usually suffer from high computational complexity, i.e., consuming very long training time and storing huge amount of trainable parameters. To address these problems, we propose a new broad recommender system called Broad Collaborative Filtering (BroadCF), which is an efficient nonlinear collaborative filtering approach. Instead of DNNs, Broad Learning System (BLS) is used as a mapping function to learn the complex nonlinear relationships between users and items, which can avoid the above issues while achieving very satisfactory recommendation performance. However, it is not feasible to directly feed the original rating data into BLS. To this end, we propose a user-item rating collaborative vector preprocessing procedure to generate low-dimensional user-item input data, which is able to harness quality judgments of the most similar users/items. Extensive experiments conducted on seven benchmark datasets have confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed BroadCF algorithm
20. Poisoning Deep Learning based Recommender Model in Federated Learning Scenarios
Dazhong Rong, Qinming He, Jianhai Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13594
Various attack methods against recommender systems have been proposed in the past years, and the security issues of recommender systems have drawn considerable attention. Traditional attacks attempt to make target items recommended to as many users as possible by poisoning the training data. Benifiting from the feature of protecting users' private data, federated recommendation can effectively defend such attacks. Therefore, quite a few works have devoted themselves to developing federated recommender systems. For proving current federated recommendation is still vulnerable, in this work we probe to design attack approaches targeting deep learning based recommender models in federated learning scenarios. Specifically, our attacks generate poisoned gradients for manipulated malicious users to upload based on two strategies (i.e., random approximation and hard user mining). Extensive experiments show that our well-designed attacks can effectively poison the target models, and the attack effectiveness sets the state-of-the-art.
21. AutoLossGen: Automatic Loss Function Generation for Recommender Systems
Zelong Li, Jianchao Ji, Yingqiang Ge, Yongfeng Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.13160
In recommendation systems, the choice of loss function is critical since a good loss may significantly improve the model performance. However, manually designing a good loss is a big challenge due to the complexity of the problem. A large fraction of previous work focuses on handcrafted loss functions, which needs significant expertise and human effort. In this paper, inspired by the recent development of automated machine learning, we propose an automatic loss function generation framework, AutoLossGen, which is able to generate loss functions directly constructed from basic mathematical operators without prior knowledge on loss structure. More specifically, we develop a controller model driven by reinforcement learning to generate loss functions, and develop iterative and alternating optimization schedule to update the parameters of both the controller model and the recommender model. One challenge for automatic loss generation in recommender systems is the extreme sparsity of recommendation datasets, which leads to the sparse reward problem for loss generation and search. To solve the problem, we further develop a reward filtering mechanism for efficient and effective loss generation. Experimental results show that our framework manages to create tailored loss functions for different recommendation models and datasets, and the generated loss gives better recommendation performance than commonly used baseline losses. Besides, most of the generated losses are transferable, i.e., the loss generated based on one model and dataset also works well for another model or dataset. Source code of the work is available at
22. Generating Self-Serendipity Preference in Recommender Systems for Addressing Cold Start Problems
Yuanbo Xu, Yongjian Yang, En Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.12651
Classical accuracy-oriented Recommender Systems (RSs) typically face the cold-start problem and the filter-bubble problem when users suffer the familiar, repeated, and even predictable recommendations, making them boring and unsatisfied. To address the above issues, serendipity-oriented RSs are proposed to recommend appealing and valuable items significantly deviating from users' historical interactions and thus satisfying them by introducing unexplored but relevant candidate items to them. In this paper, we devise a novel serendipity-oriented recommender system (\textbf{G}enerative \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{S}erendipity \textbf{R}ecommender \textbf{S}ystem, \textbf{GS-RS}) that generates users' self-serendipity preferences to enhance the recommendation performance. Specifically, this model extracts users' interest and satisfaction preferences, generates virtual but convincible neighbors' preferences from themselves, and achieves their self-serendipity preference. Then these preferences are injected into the rating matrix as additional information for RS models. Note that GS-RS can not only tackle the cold-start problem but also provides diverse but relevant recommendations to relieve the filter-bubble problem. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed GS-RS model can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art baseline approaches in serendipity measures with a stable accuracy performance.
23. Estimating and Penalizing Induced Preference Shifts in Recommender Systems
Micah Carroll, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Stuart Russell, Anca Dragan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11966
The content that a recommender system (RS) shows to users influences them. Therefore, when choosing which recommender to deploy, one is implicitly also choosing to induce specific internal states in users. Even more, systems trained via long-horizon optimization will have direct incentives to manipulate users, e.g. shift their preferences so they are easier to satisfy. In this work we focus on induced preference shifts in users. We argue that - before deployment - system designers should: estimate the shifts a recommender would induce; evaluate whether such shifts would be undesirable; and even actively optimize to avoid problematic shifts. These steps involve two challenging ingredients: estimation requires anticipating how hypothetical policies would influence user preferences if deployed - we do this by using historical user interaction data to train predictive user model which implicitly contains their preference dynamics; evaluation and optimization additionally require metrics to assess whether such influences are manipulative or otherwise unwanted - we use the notion of "safe shifts", that define a trust region within which behavior is safe. In simulated experiments, we show that our learned preference dynamics model is effective in estimating user preferences and how they would respond to new recommenders. Additionally, we show that recommenders that optimize for staying in the trust region can avoid manipulative behaviors while still generating engagement.
24. Broad Recommender System: An Efficient Nonlinear Collaborative Filtering Approach
Ling Huang, Can-Rong Guan, Zhen-Wei Huang, Yuefang Gao, Yingjie Kuang, Chang-Dong Wang, C. L. Philip Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11602
Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely introduced into Collaborative Filtering (CF) to produce more accurate recommendation results due to their capability of capturing the complex nonlinear relationships between items and users.However, the DNNs-based models usually suffer from high computational complexity, i.e., consuming very long training time and storing huge amount of trainable parameters. To address these problems, we propose a new broad recommender system called Broad Collaborative Filtering (BroadCF), which is an efficient nonlinear collaborative filtering approach. Instead of DNNs, Broad Learning System (BLS) is used as a mapping function to learn the complex nonlinear relationships between users and items, which can avoid the above issues while achieving very satisfactory recommendation performance. However, it is not feasible to directly feed the original rating data into BLS. To this end, we propose a user-item rating collaborative vector preprocessing procedure to generate low-dimensional user-item input data, which is able to harness quality judgments of the most similar users/items. Extensive experiments conducted on seven benchmark datasets have confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed BroadCF algorithm
25. Long-run User Value Optimization in Recommender Systems through Content Creation Modeling
Akos Lada, Xiaoxuan Liu, Jens Rischbieth, Yi Wang, Yuwen Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11421
Content recommender systems are generally adept at maximizing immediate user satisfaction but to optimize for the \textit{long-run} user value, we need more statistically sophisticated solutions than off-the-shelf simple recommender algorithms. In this paper we lay out such a solution to optimize \textit{long-run} user value through discounted utility maximization and a machine learning method we have developed for estimating it. Our method estimates which content producers are most likely to create the highest long-run user value if their content is shown more to users who enjoy it in the present. We do this estimation with the help of an A/B test and heterogeneous effects machine learning model. We have used such models in Facebook's feed ranking system, and such a model can be used in other recommender systems.
26. Post Processing Recommender Systems with Knowledge Graphs for Recency, Popularity, and Diversity of Explanations
Giacomo Balloccu, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11241
Existing explainable recommender systems have mainly modeled relationships between recommended and already experienced products, and shaped explanation types accordingly (e.g., movie "x" starred by actress "y" recommended to a user because that user watched other movies with "y" as an actress). However, none of these systems has investigated the extent to which properties of a single explanation (e.g., the recency of interaction with that actress) and of a group of explanations for a recommended list (e.g., the diversity of the explanation types) can influence the perceived explaination quality. In this paper, we conceptualized three novel properties that model the quality of the explanations (linking interaction recency, shared entity popularity, and explanation type diversity) and proposed re-ranking approaches able to optimize for these properties. Experiments on two public data sets showed that our approaches can increase explanation quality according to the proposed properties, fairly across demographic groups, while preserving recommendation utility. The source code and data are available at
27. ReLoop: A Self-Correction Continual Learning Loop for Recommender Systems
Guohao Cai, Jieming Zhu, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Xiuqiang He, Ruiming Tang, Rui Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.11165
Deep learning-based recommendation has become a widely adopted technique in various online applications. Typically, a deployed model undergoes frequent re-training to capture users' dynamic behaviors from newly collected interaction logs. However, the current model training process only acquires users' feedbacks as labels, but fail to take into account the errors made in previous recommendations. Inspired by the intuition that humans usually reflect and learn from mistakes, in this paper, we attempt to build a self-correction learning loop (dubbed ReLoop) for recommender systems. In particular, a new customized loss is employed to encourage every new model version to reduce prediction errors over the previous model version during training. Our ReLoop learning framework enables a continual self-correction process in the long run and thus is expected to obtain better performance over existing training strategies. Both offline experiments and an online A/B test have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of ReLoop.
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