Improving Video Game Recommendations Using a Hybrid, Neural Network and Keyword Ranking Approach

Recommendations systems are software solutions for finding high-quality and relevant content for a given user type ranging from online shoppers, to music listeners, to video game players. Traditional recommendation systems use user review data to make recommendations, but we still want recommendations to perform well for new users with no review data. Currently, one of the problems that exists in recommendations is poor recommendation accuracy when only a small amount of data exists for a user, called the cold start problem. In this research we investigate solutions for the cold start problem in video game recommendations and we propose a solution that uses a hybrid neural network and keyword ranking approach. We evaluate this system with precision and recall metrics and compare the results to a traditional recommendation system. We present that this hybrid system offers performance gains when recommending to users who have low-medium previous reviews

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

Seamlessly Unifying Attributes and Items: Conversational Recommendation for Cold-Start Users

Static recommendation methods like collaborative filtering suffer from the inherent limitation of performing real-time personalization for cold-start users. Online recommendation, e.g., multi-armed bandit approach, addresses this limitation by interactively exploring user preference online and pursuing the exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off. However, existing bandit-based methods model recommendation actions homogeneously. Specifically, they only consider the items as the arms, being incapable of handling the item attributes, which naturally provide interpretable information of user's current demands and can effectively filter out undesired items. In this work, we consider the conversational recommendation for cold-start users, where a system can both ask the attributes from and recommend items to a user interactively. This important scenario was studied in a recent work. However, it employs a hand-crafted function to decide when to ask attributes or make recommendations. Such separate modeling of attributes and items makes the effectiveness of the system highly rely on the choice of the hand-crafted function, thus introducing fragility to the system. To address this limitation, we seamlessly unify attributes and items in the same arm space and achieve their EE trade-offs automatically using the framework of Thompson Sampling. Our Conversational Thompson Sampling (ConTS) model holistically solves all questions in conversational recommendation by choosing the arm with the maximal reward to play. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that ConTS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods Conversational UCB (ConUCB) and Estimation-Action-Reflection model in both metrics of success rate and average number of conversation turns.Comment: TOIS 202

Adversarial Training Towards Robust Multimedia Recommender System

With the prevalence of multimedia content on the Web, developing recommender solutions that can effectively leverage the rich signal in multimedia data is in urgent need. Owing to the success of deep neural networks in representation learning, recent advance on multimedia recommendation has largely focused on exploring deep learning methods to improve the recommendation accuracy. To date, however, there has been little effort to investigate the robustness of multimedia representation and its impact on the performance of multimedia recommendation. In this paper, we shed light on the robustness of multimedia recommender system. Using the state-of-the-art recommendation framework and deep image features, we demonstrate that the overall system is not robust, such that a small (but purposeful) perturbation on the input image will severely decrease the recommendation accuracy. This implies the possible weakness of multimedia recommender system in predicting user preference, and more importantly, the potential of improvement by enhancing its robustness. To this end, we propose a novel solution named Adversarial Multimedia Recommendation (AMR), which can lead to a more robust multimedia recommender model by using adversarial learning. The idea is to train the model to defend an adversary, which adds perturbations to the target image with the purpose of decreasing the model's accuracy. We conduct experiments on two representative multimedia recommendation tasks, namely, image recommendation and visually-aware product recommendation. Extensive results verify the positive effect of adversarial learning and demonstrate the effectiveness of our AMR method. Source codes are available in https://github.com/duxy-me/AMR.Comment: TKD