Recommendation systems are ubiquitous, acting as an essential component in online platforms to help users discover items of interest. For example, streaming services rely on recommendation systems to serve high-quality informational and entertaining content to their users, and e-commerce platforms recommend interesting items to assist customers in making shopping decisions. Further-more, the algorithms and frameworks driving recommendation systems provide the foundation for new personalized machine learning methods that have wide-ranging impacts.
While successful, many current recommendation systems are fundamentally not sustainable: they focus on short-lived engagement objectives, requiring constant fine-tuning to adapt to the dynamics of evolving systems, or are subject to performance degradation as users and items churn in the system. In this dissertation research, we seek to lay the foundations for a new class of sustainable recommendation systems. By sustainable, we mean a recommendation system should be fundamentally long-lived, while enhancing both current and future potential to connect users with interesting content. By building such sustainable recommendation systems, we can continuously improve the user experience and provide a long-lived foundation for ongoing engagement. Building on a large body of work in recommendation systems, with the advance in graph neural networks, and with recent success in meta-learning for ML-based models, this dissertation focuses on sustainability in recommendation systems from the following three perspectives with corresponding contributions:
• Adaptivity: The first contribution lies in capturing the temporal effects from the instant shifting of users’ preferences to the lifelong evolution of users and items in real-world scenarios, leading to models which are highly adaptive to the temporal dynamics present in online platforms and provide improved item recommendation at different timestamps.
• Resilience: Secondly, we seek to identify the elite users who act as the “backbone” recommendation systems shape the opinions of other users via their public activities. By investigating the correlation between user’s preference on item consumption and their connections to the “backbone”, we enable recommendation models to be resilient to dramatic changes including churn in new items and users, and frequently updated connections between users in online communities.
• Robustness: Finally, we explore the design of a novel framework for “learning-to-adapt” to the imperfect test cases in recommendation systems ranging from cold-start users with few interactions to casual users with low activity levels. Such a model is robust to the imperfection in real-world environments, resulting in reliable recommendation to meet user needs and aspirations
