BoostFM: Boosted Factorization Machines for Top-N Feature-based Recommendation

Feature-based matrix factorization techniques such as Factorization Machines (FM) have been proven to achieve impressive accuracy for the rating prediction task. However, most common recommendation scenarios are formulated as a top-N item ranking problem with implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, purchases)rather than explicit ratings. To address this problem, with both implicit feedback and feature information, we propose a feature-based collaborative boosting recommender called BoostFM, which integrates boosting into factorization models during the process of item ranking. Specifically, BoostFM is an adaptive boosting framework that linearly combines multiple homogeneous component recommenders, which are repeatedly constructed on the basis of the individual FM model by a re-weighting scheme. Two ways are proposed to efficiently train the component recommenders from the perspectives of both pairwise and listwise Learning-to-Rank (L2R). The properties of our proposed method are empirically studied on three real-world datasets. The experimental results show that BoostFM outperforms a number of state-of-the-art approaches for top-N recommendation

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

Adversarial Sampling and Training for Semi-Supervised Information Retrieval

Ad-hoc retrieval models with implicit feedback often have problems, e.g., the imbalanced classes in the data set. Too few clicked documents may hurt generalization ability of the models, whereas too many non-clicked documents may harm effectiveness of the models and efficiency of training. In addition, recent neural network-based models are vulnerable to adversarial examples due to the linear nature in them. To solve the problems at the same time, we propose an adversarial sampling and training framework to learn ad-hoc retrieval models with implicit feedback. Our key idea is (i) to augment clicked examples by adversarial training for better generalization and (ii) to obtain very informational non-clicked examples by adversarial sampling and training. Experiments are performed on benchmark data sets for common ad-hoc retrieval tasks such as Web search, item recommendation, and question answering. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approaches significantly outperform strong baselines especially for high-ranked documents, and they outperform IRGAN in NDCG@5 using only 5% of labeled data for the Web search task.Comment: Published in WWW 201

Deep Learning based Recommender System: A Survey and New Perspectives

With the ever-growing volume of online information, recommender systems have been an effective strategy to overcome such information overload. The utility of recommender systems cannot be overstated, given its widespread adoption in many web applications, along with its potential impact to ameliorate many problems related to over-choice. In recent years, deep learning has garnered considerable interest in many research fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, owing not only to stellar performance but also the attractive property of learning feature representations from scratch. The influence of deep learning is also pervasive, recently demonstrating its effectiveness when applied to information retrieval and recommender systems research. Evidently, the field of deep learning in recommender system is flourishing. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on deep learning based recommender systems. More concretely, we provide and devise a taxonomy of deep learning based recommendation models, along with providing a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art. Finally, we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to this new exciting development of the field.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ACM Computing Surveys. https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/328502