Interacting Attention-gated Recurrent Networks for Recommendation

Capturing the temporal dynamics of user preferences over items is important for recommendation. Existing methods mainly assume that all time steps in user-item interaction history are equally relevant to recommendation, which however does not apply in real-world scenarios where user-item interactions can often happen accidentally. More importantly, they learn user and item dynamics separately, thus failing to capture their joint effects on user-item interactions. To better model user and item dynamics, we present the Interacting Attention-gated Recurrent Network (IARN) which adopts the attention model to measure the relevance of each time step. In particular, we propose a novel attention scheme to learn the attention scores of user and item history in an interacting way, thus to account for the dependencies between user and item dynamics in shaping user-item interactions. By doing so, IARN can selectively memorize different time steps of a user's history when predicting her preferences over different items. Our model can therefore provide meaningful interpretations for recommendation results, which could be further enhanced by auxiliary features. Extensive validation on real-world datasets shows that IARN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Accepted by ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 201

NAIRS: A Neural Attentive Interpretable Recommendation System

In this paper, we develop a neural attentive interpretable recommendation system, named NAIRS. A self-attention network, as a key component of the system, is designed to assign attention weights to interacted items of a user. This attention mechanism can distinguish the importance of the various interacted items in contributing to a user profile. Based on the user profiles obtained by the self-attention network, NAIRS offers personalized high-quality recommendation. Moreover, it develops visual cues to interpret recommendations. This demo application with the implementation of NAIRS enables users to interact with a recommendation system, and it persistently collects training data to improve the system. The demonstration and experimental results show the effectiveness of NAIRS.Comment: This paper was published as a demonstration paper on WSDM'19. In this version, we added a detailed related work sectio

Lifelong Sequential Modeling with Personalized Memorization for User Response Prediction

User response prediction, which models the user preference w.r.t. the presented items, plays a key role in online services. With two-decade rapid development, nowadays the cumulated user behavior sequences on mature Internet service platforms have become extremely long since the user's first registration. Each user not only has intrinsic tastes, but also keeps changing her personal interests during lifetime. Hence, it is challenging to handle such lifelong sequential modeling for each individual user. Existing methodologies for sequential modeling are only capable of dealing with relatively recent user behaviors, which leaves huge space for modeling long-term especially lifelong sequential patterns to facilitate user modeling. Moreover, one user's behavior may be accounted for various previous behaviors within her whole online activity history, i.e., long-term dependency with multi-scale sequential patterns. In order to tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Periodic Memory Network for lifelong sequential modeling with personalized memorization of sequential patterns for each user. The model also adopts a hierarchical and periodical updating mechanism to capture multi-scale sequential patterns of user interests while supporting the evolving user behavior logs. The experimental results over three large-scale real-world datasets have demonstrated the advantages of our proposed model with significant improvement in user response prediction performance against the state-of-the-arts.Comment: SIGIR 2019. Reproducible codes and datasets: https://github.com/alimamarankgroup/HPM