Hierarchical Attention Network for Visually-aware Food Recommendation

Food recommender systems play an important role in assisting users to identify the desired food to eat. Deciding what food to eat is a complex and multi-faceted process, which is influenced by many factors such as the ingredients, appearance of the recipe, the user's personal preference on food, and various contexts like what had been eaten in the past meals. In this work, we formulate the food recommendation problem as predicting user preference on recipes based on three key factors that determine a user's choice on food, namely, 1) the user's (and other users') history; 2) the ingredients of a recipe; and 3) the descriptive image of a recipe. To address this challenging problem, we develop a dedicated neural network based solution Hierarchical Attention based Food Recommendation (HAFR) which is capable of: 1) capturing the collaborative filtering effect like what similar users tend to eat; 2) inferring a user's preference at the ingredient level; and 3) learning user preference from the recipe's visual images. To evaluate our proposed method, we construct a large-scale dataset consisting of millions of ratings from AllRecipes.com. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms several competing recommender solutions like Factorization Machine and Visual Bayesian Personalized Ranking with an average improvement of 12%, offering promising results in predicting user preference for food. Codes and dataset will be released upon acceptance

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

A Broad Learning Approach for Context-Aware Mobile Application Recommendation

With the rapid development of mobile apps, the availability of a large number of mobile apps in application stores brings challenge to locate appropriate apps for users. Providing accurate mobile app recommendation for users becomes an imperative task. Conventional approaches mainly focus on learning users' preferences and app features to predict the user-app ratings. However, most of them did not consider the interactions among the context information of apps. To address this issue, we propose a broad learning approach for \textbf{C}ontext-\textbf{A}ware app recommendation with \textbf{T}ensor \textbf{A}nalysis (CATA). Specifically, we utilize a tensor-based framework to effectively integrate user's preference, app category information and multi-view features to facilitate the performance of app rating prediction. The multidimensional structure is employed to capture the hidden relationships between multiple app categories with multi-view features. We develop an efficient factorization method which applies Tucker decomposition to learn the full-order interactions within multiple categories and features. Furthermore, we employ a group $\ell_{1}-$norm regularization to learn the group-wise feature importance of each view with respect to each app category. Experiments on two real-world mobile app datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method