Item-to-item collaborative filtering ( aka. item-based CF) has been long used for building recommender systems in industrial settings, owing to its interpretability and efficiency in real-time personalization. It builds a user's profile as her historically interacted items, recommending new items that are similar to the user's profile. As such, the key to an item-based CF method is in the estimation of item similarities. Early approaches use statistical measures such as cosine similarity and Pearson coefficient to estimate item similarities, which are less accurate since they lack tailored optimization for the recommendation task. In recent years, several works attempt to learn item similarities from data, by expressing the similarity as an underlying model and estimating model parameters by optimizing a recommendation-aware objective function. While extensive efforts have been made to use shallow linear models for learning item similarities, there has been relatively less work exploring nonlinear neural network models for item-based CF. In this work, we propose a neural network model named Neural Attentive Item Similarity model (NAIS) for item-based CF. The key to our design of NAIS is an attention network, which is capable of distinguishing which historical items in a user profile are more important for a prediction. Compared to the state-of-the-art item-based CF method Factored Item Similarity Model (FISM) [1] , our NAIS has stronger representation power with only a few additional parameters brought by the attention network. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of NAIS. This work is the first attempt that designs neural network models for item-based CF, opening up new research possibilities for future developments of neural recommender systems.
To learn a recommender model from implicit feedback, two types of learning to rank (L2R) objective functions have been commonly applied: pointwise and pairwise. Pointwise L2R methods either optimize a regression-based squared loss @cite_44 @cite_35 or classification-based log loss @cite_38 , by either sampling negative feedback from missing data @cite_9 or treating all missing data as negative feedback @cite_1 . For linear CF models like MF and its variants ( factorization machines), there exist efficient coordinate descent algorithms that optimize squared loss over all missing data @cite_1 @cite_6 . However for complex non-linear CF models like neural networks, only SGD-based optimization methods are applicable, and sampling negative feedback from missing data is necessary for the sake of efficiency. Pairwise L2R methods consider a pair of a user's positive and (sampled) negative feedback, maximizing the margin of their predicted scores regardless of their exact values @cite_37 @cite_10 . The underlying assumption is that an observed interaction should be more likely of interest to the user than an unobserved feedback. A state-of-the-art work develops adversarial personalized ranking @cite_20 , which employs adversarial training on pairwise learning to enhance the robustness of recommender models and improve their generalization performance.
@cite_35 @cite_38 @cite_37 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_44 @cite_10 @cite_20
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Implicit feedbacks have recently received much attention in recommendation communities due to their close relationship with real industry problem settings. However, most works only exploit users’ homogeneous implicit feedbacks such as users’ transaction records from “bought” activities, and ignore the other type of implicit feedbacks like examination records from “browsed” activities. The latter are usually more abundant though they are associated with high uncertainty w.r.t. users’ true preferences. In this paper, we study a new recommendation problem called heterogeneous implicit feedbacks (HIF), where the fundamental challenge is the uncertainty of the examination records. As a response, we design a novel preference learning algorithm to learn a confidence for each uncertain examination record with the help of transaction records. Specifically, we generalize Bayesian personalized ranking (BPR), a seminal pairwise learning algorithm for homogeneous implicit feedbacks, and learn the confidence adaptively, which is thus called adaptive Bayesian personalized ranking (ABPR). ABPR has the merits of uncertainty reduction on examination records and accurate pairwise preference learning on implicit feedbacks. Experimental results on two public data sets show that ABPR is able to leverage uncertain examination records effectively, and can achieve better recommendation performance than the state-of-the-art algorithm on various ranking-oriented evaluation metrics. In recent years, interest in recommender research has shifted from explicit feedback towards implicit feedback data. A diversity of complex models has been proposed for a wide variety of applications. Despite this, learning from implicit feedback is still computationally challenging. So far, most work relies on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) solvers which are easy to derive, but in practice challenging to apply, especially for tasks with many items. For the simple matrix factorization model, an efficient coordinate descent (CD) solver has been previously proposed. However, efficient CD approaches have not been derived for more complex models. In this paper, we provide a new framework for deriving efficient CD algorithms for complex recommender models. We identify and introduce the property of k-separable models. We show that k-separability is a sufficient property to allow efficient optimization of implicit recommender problems with CD. We illustrate this framework on a variety of state-of-the-art models including factorization machines and Tucker decomposition. To summarize, our work provides the theory and building blocks to derive efficient implicit CD algorithms for complex recommender models. State-of-the-art item recommendation algorithms, which apply Factorization Machines (FM) as a scoring function and pairwise ranking loss as a trainer (PRFM for short), have been recently investigated for the implicit feedback based context-aware recommendation problem (IFCAR). However, good recommenders particularly emphasize on the accuracy near the top of the ranked list, and typical pairwise loss functions might not match well with such a requirement. In this paper, we demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, PRFM models usually lead to non-optimal item recommendation results due to such a mismatch. Inspired by the success of LambdaRank, we introduce Lambda Factorization Machines (LambdaFM), which is particularly intended for optimizing ranking performance for IFCAR. We also point out that the original lambda function suffers from the issue of expensive computational complexity in such settings due to a large amount of unobserved feedback. Hence, instead of directly adopting the original lambda strategy, we create three effective lambda surrogates by conducting a theoretical analysis for lambda from the top-N optimization perspective. Further, we prove that the proposed lambda surrogates are generic and applicable to a large set of pairwise ranking loss functions. Experimental results demonstrate LambdaFM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on three real-world datasets in terms of four standard ranking measures. Pairwise algorithms are popular for learning recommender systems from implicit feedback. For each user, or more generally context, they try to discriminate between a small set of selected items and the large set of remaining (irrelevant) items. Learning is typically based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with uniformly drawn pairs. In this work, we show that convergence of such SGD learning algorithms slows down considerably if the item popularity has a tailed distribution. We propose a non-uniform item sampler to overcome this problem. The proposed sampler is context-dependent and oversamples informative pairs to speed up convergence. An efficient implementation with constant amortized runtime costs is developed. Furthermore, it is shown how the proposed learning algorithm can be applied to a large class of recommender models. The properties of the new learning algorithm are studied empirically on two real-world recommender system problems. The experiments indicate that the proposed adaptive sampler improves the state-of-the art learning algorithm largely in convergence without negative effects on prediction quality or iteration runtime.