Adversarial Personalized Ranking for Recommendation

Item recommendation is a personalized ranking task. To this end, many recommender systems optimize models with pairwise ranking objectives, such as the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR). Using matrix Factorization (MF) --- the most widely used model in recommendation --- as a demonstration, we show that optimizing it with BPR leads to a recommender model that is not robust. In particular, we find that the resultant model is highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations on its model parameters, which implies the possibly large error in generalization. To enhance the robustness of a recommender model and thus improve its generalization performance, we propose a new optimization framework, namely Adversarial Personalized Ranking (APR). In short, our APR enhances the pairwise ranking method BPR by performing adversarial training. It can be interpreted as playing a minimax game, where the minimization of the BPR objective function meanwhile defends an adversary, which adds adversarial perturbations on model parameters to maximize the BPR objective function. To illustrate how it works, we implement APR on MF by adding adversarial perturbations on the embedding vectors of users and items. Extensive experiments on three public real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of APR --- by optimizing MF with APR, it outperforms BPR with a relative improvement of 11.2% on average and achieves state-of-the-art performance for item recommendation. Our implementation is available at: https://github.com/hexiangnan/adversarial_personalized_ranking.Comment: SIGIR 201

Deep Item-based Collaborative Filtering for Top-N Recommendation

Item-based Collaborative Filtering(short for ICF) has been widely adopted in recommender systems in industry, owing to its strength in user interest modeling and ease in online personalization. By constructing a user's profile with the items that the user has consumed, ICF recommends items that are similar to the user's profile. With the prevalence of machine learning in recent years, significant processes have been made for ICF by learning item similarity (or representation) from data. Nevertheless, we argue that most existing works have only considered linear and shallow relationship between items, which are insufficient to capture the complicated decision-making process of users. In this work, we propose a more expressive ICF solution by accounting for the nonlinear and higher-order relationship among items. Going beyond modeling only the second-order interaction (e.g. similarity) between two items, we additionally consider the interaction among all interacted item pairs by using nonlinear neural networks. Through this way, we can effectively model the higher-order relationship among items, capturing more complicated effects in user decision-making. For example, it can differentiate which historical itemsets in a user's profile are more important in affecting the user to make a purchase decision on an item. We treat this solution as a deep variant of ICF, thus term it as DeepICF. To justify our proposal, we perform empirical studies on two public datasets from MovieLens and Pinterest. Extensive experiments verify the highly positive effect of higher-order item interaction modeling with nonlinear neural networks. Moreover, we demonstrate that by more fine-grained second-order interaction modeling with attention network, the performance of our DeepICF method can be further improved.Comment: 25 pages, submitted to TOI

Learning with Attributed Networks: Algorithms and Applications

abstract: Attributes - that delineating the properties of data, and connections - that describing the dependencies of data, are two essential components to characterize most real-world phenomena. The synergy between these two principal elements renders a unique data representation - the attributed networks. In many cases, people are inundated with vast amounts of data that can be structured into attributed networks, and their use has been attractive to researchers and practitioners in different disciplines. For example, in social media, users interact with each other and also post personalized content; in scientific collaboration, researchers cooperate and are distinct from peers by their unique research interests; in complex diseases studies, rich gene expression complements to the gene-regulatory networks. Clearly, attributed networks are ubiquitous and form a critical component of modern information infrastructure. To gain deep insights from such networks, it requires a fundamental understanding of their unique characteristics and be aware of the related computational challenges. My dissertation research aims to develop a suite of novel learning algorithms to understand, characterize, and gain actionable insights from attributed networks, to benefit high-impact real-world applications. In the first part of this dissertation, I mainly focus on developing learning algorithms for attributed networks in a static environment at two different levels: (i) attribute level - by designing feature selection algorithms to find high-quality features that are tightly correlated with the network topology; and (ii) node level - by presenting network embedding algorithms to learn discriminative node embeddings by preserving node proximity w.r.t. network topology structure and node attribute similarity. As changes are essential components of attributed networks and the results of learning algorithms will become stale over time, in the second part of this dissertation, I propose a family of online algorithms for attributed networks in a dynamic environment to continuously update the learning results on the fly. In fact, developing application-aware learning algorithms is more desired with a clear understanding of the application domains and their unique intents. As such, in the third part of this dissertation, I am also committed to advancing real-world applications on attributed networks by incorporating the objectives of external tasks into the learning process.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201