No Arabic abstract
Recently, deep learning has made significant progress in the task of sequential recommendation. Existing neural sequential recommenders typically adopt a generative way trained with Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE). When context information (called factor) is involved, it is difficult to analyze when and how each individual factor would affect the final recommendation performance. For this purpose, we take a new perspective and introduce adversarial learning to sequential recommendation. In this paper, we present a Multi-Factor Generative Adversarial Network (MFGAN) for explicitly modeling the effect of context information on sequential recommendation. Specifically, our proposed MFGAN has two kinds of modules: a Transformer-based generator taking user behavior sequences as input to recommend the possible next items, and multiple factor-specific discriminators to evaluate the generated sub-sequence from the perspectives of different factors. To learn the parameters, we adopt the classic policy gradient method, and utilize the reward signal of discriminators for guiding the learning of the generator. Our framework is flexible to incorporate multiple kinds of factor information, and is able to trace how each factor contributes to the recommendation decision over time. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model over the state-of-the-art methods, in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.
Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) have greatly facilitated the development of sequential recommender systems by achieving state-of-the-art recommendation performance on various sequential recommendation tasks. Given a sequence of interacted items, existing DNN-based sequential recommenders commonly embed each item into a unique vector to support subsequent computations of the user interest. However, due to the potentially large number of items, the over-parameterised item embedding matrix of a sequential recommender has become a memory bottleneck for efficient deployment in resource-constrained environments, e.g., smartphones and other edge devices. Furthermore, we observe that the widely-used multi-head self-attention, though being effective in modelling sequential dependencies among items, heavily relies on redundant attention units to fully capture both global and local item-item transition patterns within a sequence. In this paper, we introduce a novel lightweight self-attentive network (LSAN) for sequential recommendation. To aggressively compress the original embedding matrix, LSAN leverages the notion of compositional embeddings, where each item embedding is composed by merging a group of selected base embedding vectors derived from substantially smaller embedding matrices. Meanwhile, to account for the intrinsic dynamics of each item, we further propose a temporal context-aware embedding composition scheme. Besides, we develop an innovative twin-attention network that alleviates the redundancy of the traditional multi-head self-attention while retaining full capacity for capturing long- and short-term (i.e., global and local) item dependencies. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that LSAN significantly advances the accuracy and memory efficiency of existing sequential recommenders.
Most sequential recommendation models capture the features of consecutive items in a user-item interaction history. Though effective, their representation expressiveness is still hindered by the sparse learning signals. As a result, the sequential recommender is prone to make inconsistent predictions. In this paper, we propose a model, SSI, to improve sequential recommendation consistency with Self-Supervised Imitation. Precisely, we extract the consistency knowledge by utilizing three self-supervised pre-training tasks, where temporal consistency and persona consistency capture user-interaction dynamics in terms of the chronological order and persona sensitivities, respectively. Furthermore, to provide the model with a global perspective, global session consistency is introduced by maximizing the mutual information among global and local interaction sequences. Finally, to comprehensively take advantage of all three independent aspects of consistency-enhanced knowledge, we establish an integrated imitation learning framework. The consistency knowledge is effectively internalized and transferred to the student model by imitating the conventional prediction logit as well as the consistency-enhanced item representations. In addition, the flexible self-supervised imitation framework can also benefit other student recommenders. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that SSI effectively outperforms the state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods.
Sequential recommendation has become increasingly essential in various online services. It aims to model the dynamic preferences of users from their historical interactions and predict their next items. The accumulated user behavior records on real systems could be very long. This rich data brings opportunities to track actual interests of users. Prior efforts mainly focus on making recommendations based on relatively recent behaviors. However, the overall sequential data may not be effectively utilized, as early interactions might affect users current choices. Also, it has become intolerable to scan the entire behavior sequence when performing inference for each user, since real-world system requires short response time. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel long sequential recommendation model, called Dynamic Memory-based Attention Network (DMAN). It segments the overall long behavior sequence into a series of sub-sequences, then trains the model and maintains a set of memory blocks to preserve long-term interests of users. To improve memory fidelity, DMAN dynamically abstracts each users long-term interest into its own memory blocks by minimizing an auxiliary reconstruction loss. Based on the dynamic memory, the users short-term and long-term interests can be explicitly extracted and combined for efficient joint recommendation. Empirical results over four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model in capturing long-term dependency over various state-of-the-art sequential models.
Using reviews to learn user and item representations is important for recommender system. Current review based methods can be divided into two categories: (1) the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based models that extract n-gram features from user/item reviews; (2) the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based models that learn global contextual representations from reviews for users and items. Despite their success, both CNN and RNN based models in previous studies suffer from their own drawbacks. While CNN based models are weak in modeling long-dependency relation in text, RNN based models are slow in training and inference due to their incapability with parallel computing. To alleviate these problems, we propose a new text encoder module for review modeling in recommendation by combining convolution networks with self-attention networks to model local and global interactions in text together.As different words, sentences, reviews have different importance for modeling user and item representations, we construct review models hierarchically in sentence-level, review-level, and user/item level by encoding words for sentences, encoding sentences for reviews, and encoding reviews for user and item representations. Experiments on Amazon Product Benchmark show that our model can achieve significant better performance comparing to the state-of-the-art review based recommendation models.
Sequential Recommendationdescribes a set of techniques to model dynamic user behavior in order to predict future interactions in sequential user data. At their core, such approaches model transition probabilities between items in a sequence, whether through Markov chains, recurrent networks, or more recently, Transformers. However both old and new issues remain, including data-sparsity and noisy data; such issues can impair the performance, especially in complex, parameter-hungry models. In this paper, we investigate the application of contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) to the sequential recommendation, as a way to alleviate some of these issues. Contrastive SSL constructs augmentations from unlabelled instances, where agreements among positive pairs are maximized. It is challenging to devise a contrastive SSL framework for a sequential recommendation, due to its discrete nature, correlations among items, and skewness of length distributions. To this end, we propose a novel framework, Contrastive Self-supervised Learning for sequential Recommendation (CoSeRec). We introduce two informative augmentation operators leveraging item correlations to create high-quality views for contrastive learning. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on improving model performance and the robustness against sparse and noisy data. Our implementation is available online at url{https://github.com/YChen1993/CoSeRec}