No Arabic abstract
Latent Factor Model (LFM) is one of the most successful methods for Collaborative filtering (CF) in the recommendation system, in which both users and items are projected into a joint latent factor space. Base on matrix factorization applied usually in pattern recognition, LFM models user-item interactions as inner products of factor vectors of user and item in that space and can be efficiently solved by least square methods with optimal estimation. However, such optimal estimation methods are prone to overfitting due to the extreme sparsity of user-item interactions. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian treatment for LFM, named Bayesian Latent Factor Model (BLFM). Based on observed user-item interactions, we build a probabilistic factor model in which the regularization is introduced via placing prior constraint on latent factors, and the likelihood function is established over observations and parameters. Then we draw samples of latent factors from the posterior distribution with Variational Inference (VI) to predict expected value. We further make an extension to BLFM, called BLFMBias, incorporating user-dependent and item-dependent biases into the model for enhancing performance. Extensive experiments on the movie rating dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed models by compared with several strong baselines.
Collaborative Filtering aims at exploiting the feedback of users to provide personalised recommendations. Such algorithms look for latent variables in a large sparse matrix of ratings. They can be enhanced by adding side information to tackle the well-known cold start problem. While Neu-ral Networks have tremendous success in image and speech recognition, they have received less attention in Collaborative Filtering. This is all the more surprising that Neural Networks are able to discover latent variables in large and heterogeneous datasets. In this paper, we introduce a Collaborative Filtering Neural network architecture aka CFN which computes a non-linear Matrix Factorization from sparse rating inputs and side information. We show experimentally on the MovieLens and Douban dataset that CFN outper-forms the state of the art and benefits from side information. We provide an implementation of the algorithm as a reusable plugin for Torch, a popular Neural Network framework.
Due to its storage and retrieval efficiency, cross-modal hashing~(CMH) has been widely used for cross-modal similarity search in multimedia applications. According to the training strategy, existing CMH methods can be mainly divided into two categories: relaxation-based continuous methods and discrete methods. In general, the training of relaxation-based continuous methods is faster than discrete methods, but the accuracy of relaxation-based continuous methods is not satisfactory. On the contrary, the accuracy of discrete methods is typically better than relaxation-based continuous methods, but the training of discrete methods is time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel CMH method, called discrete latent factor model based cross-modal hashing~(DLFH), for cross modal similarity search. DLFH is a discrete method which can directly learn the binary hash codes for CMH. At the same time, the training of DLFH is efficient. Experiments on real datasets show that DLFH can achieve significantly better accuracy than existing methods, and the training time of DLFH is comparable to that of relaxation-based continuous methods which are much faster than existing discrete methods.
Recommender systems are important and valuable tools for many personalized services. Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms -- among others -- are fundamental algorithms driving the underlying mechanism of personalized recommendation. Many of the traditional CF algorithms are designed based on the fundamental idea of mining or learning correlative patterns from data for matching, including memory-based methods such as user/item-based CF as well as learning-based methods such as matrix factorization and deep learning models. However, advancing from correlative learning to causal learning is an important problem, because causal/counterfactual modeling can help us to think outside of the observational data for user modeling and personalization. In this paper, we propose Causal Collaborative Filtering (CCF) -- a general framework for modeling causality in collaborative filtering and recommendation. We first provide a unified causal view of CF and mathematically show that many of the traditional CF algorithms are actually special cases of CCF under simplified causal graphs. We then propose a conditional intervention approach for $do$-calculus so that we can estimate the causal relations based on observational data. Finally, we further propose a general counterfactual constrained learning framework for estimating the user-item preferences. Experiments are conducted on two types of real-world datasets -- traditional and randomized trial data -- and results show that our framework can improve the recommendation performance of many CF algorithms.
User-item interactions in recommendations can be naturally de-noted as a user-item bipartite graph. Given the success of graph neural networks (GNNs) in graph representation learning, GNN-based C methods have been proposed to advance recommender systems. These methods often make recommendations based on the learned user and item embeddings. However, we found that they do not perform well wit sparse user-item graphs which are quite common in real-world recommendations. Therefore, in this work, we introduce a novel perspective to build GNN-based CF methods for recommendations which leads to the proposed framework Localized Graph Collaborative Filtering (LGCF). One key advantage of LGCF is that it does not need to learn embeddings for each user and item, which is challenging in sparse scenarios. Alternatively, LGCF aims at encoding useful CF information into a localized graph and making recommendations based on such graph. Extensive experiments on various datasets validate the effectiveness of LGCF especially in sparse scenarios. Furthermore, empirical results demonstrate that LGCF provides complementary information to the embedding-based CF model which can be utilized to boost recommendation performance.
A growing proportion of human interactions are digitized on social media platforms and subjected to algorithmic decision-making, and it has become increasingly important to ensure fair treatment from these algorithms. In this work, we investigate gender bias in collaborative-filtering recommender systems trained on social media data. We develop neural fair collaborative filtering (NFCF), a practical framework for mitigating gender bias in recommending sensitive items (e.g. jobs, academic concentrations, or courses of study) using a pre-training and fine-tuning approach to neural collaborative filtering, augmented with bias correction techniques. We show the utility of our methods for gender de-biased career and college major recommendations on the MovieLens dataset and a Facebook dataset, respectively, and achieve better performance and fairer behavior than several state-of-the-art models.