259 research outputs found
How to Retrain Recommender System? A Sequential Meta-Learning Method
Practical recommender systems need be periodically retrained to refresh the
model with new interaction data. To pursue high model fidelity, it is usually
desirable to retrain the model on both historical and new data, since it can
account for both long-term and short-term user preference. However, a full
model retraining could be very time-consuming and memory-costly, especially
when the scale of historical data is large. In this work, we study the model
retraining mechanism for recommender systems, a topic of high practical values
but has been relatively little explored in the research community.
Our first belief is that retraining the model on historical data is
unnecessary, since the model has been trained on it before. Nevertheless,
normal training on new data only may easily cause overfitting and forgetting
issues, since the new data is of a smaller scale and contains fewer information
on long-term user preference. To address this dilemma, we propose a new
training method, aiming to abandon the historical data during retraining
through learning to transfer the past training experience. Specifically, we
design a neural network-based transfer component, which transforms the old
model to a new model that is tailored for future recommendations. To learn the
transfer component well, we optimize the "future performance" -- i.e., the
recommendation accuracy evaluated in the next time period. Our Sequential
Meta-Learning(SML) method offers a general training paradigm that is applicable
to any differentiable model. We demonstrate SML on matrix factorization and
conduct experiments on two real-world datasets. Empirical results show that SML
not only achieves significant speed-up, but also outperforms the full model
retraining in recommendation accuracy, validating the effectiveness of our
proposals. We release our codes at: https://github.com/zyang1580/SML.Comment: Appear in SIGIR 202
News Session-Based Recommendations using Deep Neural Networks
News recommender systems are aimed to personalize users experiences and help
them to discover relevant articles from a large and dynamic search space.
Therefore, news domain is a challenging scenario for recommendations, due to
its sparse user profiling, fast growing number of items, accelerated item's
value decay, and users preferences dynamic shift. Some promising results have
been recently achieved by the usage of Deep Learning techniques on Recommender
Systems, specially for item's feature extraction and for session-based
recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks. In this paper, it is proposed
an instantiation of the CHAMELEON -- a Deep Learning Meta-Architecture for News
Recommender Systems. This architecture is composed of two modules, the first
responsible to learn news articles representations, based on their text and
metadata, and the second module aimed to provide session-based recommendations
using Recurrent Neural Networks. The recommendation task addressed in this work
is next-item prediction for users sessions: "what is the next most likely
article a user might read in a session?" Users sessions context is leveraged by
the architecture to provide additional information in such extreme cold-start
scenario of news recommendation. Users' behavior and item features are both
merged in an hybrid recommendation approach. A temporal offline evaluation
method is also proposed as a complementary contribution, for a more realistic
evaluation of such task, considering dynamic factors that affect global
readership interests like popularity, recency, and seasonality. Experiments
with an extensive number of session-based recommendation methods were performed
and the proposed instantiation of CHAMELEON meta-architecture obtained a
significant relative improvement in top-n accuracy and ranking metrics (10% on
Hit Rate and 13% on MRR) over the best benchmark methods.Comment: Accepted for the Third Workshop on Deep Learning for Recommender
Systems - DLRS 2018, October 02-07, 2018, Vancouver, Canada.
https://recsys.acm.org/recsys18/dlrs
Personalized Video Recommendation Using Rich Contents from Videos
Video recommendation has become an essential way of helping people explore
the massive videos and discover the ones that may be of interest to them. In
the existing video recommender systems, the models make the recommendations
based on the user-video interactions and single specific content features. When
the specific content features are unavailable, the performance of the existing
models will seriously deteriorate. Inspired by the fact that rich contents
(e.g., text, audio, motion, and so on) exist in videos, in this paper, we
explore how to use these rich contents to overcome the limitations caused by
the unavailability of the specific ones. Specifically, we propose a novel
general framework that incorporates arbitrary single content feature with
user-video interactions, named as collaborative embedding regression (CER)
model, to make effective video recommendation in both in-matrix and
out-of-matrix scenarios. Our extensive experiments on two real-world
large-scale datasets show that CER beats the existing recommender models with
any single content feature and is more time efficient. In addition, we propose
a priority-based late fusion (PRI) method to gain the benefit brought by the
integrating the multiple content features. The corresponding experiment shows
that PRI brings real performance improvement to the baseline and outperforms
the existing fusion methods
Transfer Learning via Contextual Invariants for One-to-Many Cross-Domain Recommendation
The rapid proliferation of new users and items on the social web has
aggravated the gray-sheep user/long-tail item challenge in recommender systems.
Historically, cross-domain co-clustering methods have successfully leveraged
shared users and items across dense and sparse domains to improve inference
quality. However, they rely on shared rating data and cannot scale to multiple
sparse target domains (i.e., the one-to-many transfer setting). This, combined
with the increasing adoption of neural recommender architectures, motivates us
to develop scalable neural layer-transfer approaches for cross-domain learning.
Our key intuition is to guide neural collaborative filtering with
domain-invariant components shared across the dense and sparse domains,
improving the user and item representations learned in the sparse domains. We
leverage contextual invariances across domains to develop these shared modules,
and demonstrate that with user-item interaction context, we can learn-to-learn
informative representation spaces even with sparse interaction data. We show
the effectiveness and scalability of our approach on two public datasets and a
massive transaction dataset from Visa, a global payments technology company
(19% Item Recall, 3x faster vs. training separate models for each domain). Our
approach is applicable to both implicit and explicit feedback settings.Comment: SIGIR 202
CMML: Contextual Modulation Meta Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation
Practical recommender systems experience a cold-start problem when observed user-item interactions in the history are insufficient. Meta learning, especially gradient based one, can be adopted to tackle this problem by learning initial parameters of the model and thus allowing fast adaptation to a specific task from limited data examples. Though with significant performance improvement, it commonly suffers from two critical issues: the non-compatibility with mainstream industrial deployment and the heavy computational burdens, both due to the inner-loop gradient operation. These two issues make them hard to be applied in practical recommender systems. To enjoy the benefits of meta learning framework and mitigate these problems, we propose a recommendation framework called Contextual Modulation Meta Learning (CMML). CMML is composed of fully feed-forward operations so it is computationally efficient and completely compatible with the mainstream industrial deployment. CMML consists of three components, including a context encoder that can generate context embedding to represent a specific task, a hybrid context generator that aggregates specific user-item features with task-level context, and a contextual modulation network, which can modulate the recommendation model to adapt effectively. We validate our approach on both scenario-specific and user-specific cold-start setting on various real-world datasets, showing CMML can achieve comparable or even better performance with gradient based methods yet with higher computational efficiency and better interpretability
CPMR: Context-Aware Incremental Sequential Recommendation with Pseudo-Multi-Task Learning
The motivations of users to make interactions can be divided into static
preference and dynamic interest. To accurately model user representations over
time, recent studies in sequential recommendation utilize information
propagation and evolution to mine from batches of arriving interactions.
However, they ignore the fact that people are easily influenced by the recent
actions of other users in the contextual scenario, and applying evolution
across all historical interactions dilutes the importance of recent ones, thus
failing to model the evolution of dynamic interest accurately. To address this
issue, we propose a Context-Aware Pseudo-Multi-Task Recommender System (CPMR)
to model the evolution in both historical and contextual scenarios by creating
three representations for each user and item under different dynamics: static
embedding, historical temporal states, and contextual temporal states. To
dually improve the performance of temporal states evolution and incremental
recommendation, we design a Pseudo-Multi-Task Learning (PMTL) paradigm by
stacking the incremental single-target recommendations into one multi-target
task for joint optimization. Within the PMTL paradigm, CPMR employs a
shared-bottom network to conduct the evolution of temporal states across
historical and contextual scenarios, as well as the fusion of them at the
user-item level. In addition, CPMR incorporates one real tower for incremental
predictions, and two pseudo towers dedicated to updating the respective
temporal states based on new batches of interactions. Experimental results on
four benchmark recommendation datasets show that CPMR consistently outperforms
state-of-the-art baselines and achieves significant gains on three of them. The
code is available at: https://github.com/DiMarzioBian/CPMR.Comment: Accepted by CIKM 2023. Alias: "Modeling Context-Aware Temporal
Dynamics via Pseudo-Multi-Task Learning
Pretrained Embeddings for E-commerce Machine Learning: When it Fails and Why?
The use of pretrained embeddings has become widespread in modern e-commerce
machine learning (ML) systems. In practice, however, we have encountered
several key issues when using pretrained embedding in a real-world production
system, many of which cannot be fully explained by current knowledge.
Unfortunately, we find that there is a lack of a thorough understanding of how
pre-trained embeddings work, especially their intrinsic properties and
interactions with downstream tasks. Consequently, it becomes challenging to
make interactive and scalable decisions regarding the use of pre-trained
embeddings in practice.
Our investigation leads to two significant discoveries about using pretrained
embeddings in e-commerce applications. Firstly, we find that the design of the
pretraining and downstream models, particularly how they encode and decode
information via embedding vectors, can have a profound impact. Secondly, we
establish a principled perspective of pre-trained embeddings via the lens of
kernel analysis, which can be used to evaluate their predictability,
interactively and scalably. These findings help to address the practical
challenges we faced and offer valuable guidance for successful adoption of
pretrained embeddings in real-world production. Our conclusions are backed by
solid theoretical reasoning, benchmark experiments, as well as online testings
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