Temporally and Distributionally Robust Optimization for Cold-Start Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lin, Xinyu, Wang, Wenjie, Zhao, Jujia, Li, Yongqi, Feng, Fuli, Chua, Tat-Seng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Lin, Xinyu
Wang, Wenjie
Zhao, Jujia
Li, Yongqi
Feng, Fuli
Chua, Tat-Seng
author_facet Lin, Xinyu
Wang, Wenjie
Zhao, Jujia
Li, Yongqi
Feng, Fuli
Chua, Tat-Seng
contents Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender models highly depend on user-item interactions to learn CF representations, thus falling short of recommending cold-start items. To address this issue, prior studies mainly introduce item features (e.g., thumbnails) for cold-start item recommendation. They learn a feature extractor on warm-start items to align feature representations with interactions, and then leverage the feature extractor to extract the feature representations of cold-start items for interaction prediction. Unfortunately, the features of cold-start items, especially the popular ones, tend to diverge from those of warm-start ones due to temporal feature shifts, preventing the feature extractor from accurately learning feature representations of cold-start items. To alleviate the impact of temporal feature shifts, we consider using Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) to enhance the generation ability of the feature extractor. Nonetheless, existing DRO methods face an inconsistency issue: the worse-case warm-start items emphasized during DRO training might not align well with the cold-start item distribution. To capture the temporal feature shifts and combat this inconsistency issue, we propose a novel temporal DRO with new optimization objectives, namely, 1) to integrate a worst-case factor to improve the worst-case performance, and 2) to devise a shifting factor to capture the shifting trend of item features and enhance the optimization of the potentially popular groups in cold-start items. Substantial experiments on three real-world datasets validate the superiority of our temporal DRO in enhancing the generalization ability of cold-start recommender models. The code is available at https://github.com/Linxyhaha/TDRO/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_09901
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporally and Distributionally Robust Optimization for Cold-Start Recommendation
Lin, Xinyu
Wang, Wenjie
Zhao, Jujia
Li, Yongqi
Feng, Fuli
Chua, Tat-Seng
Information Retrieval
Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender models highly depend on user-item interactions to learn CF representations, thus falling short of recommending cold-start items. To address this issue, prior studies mainly introduce item features (e.g., thumbnails) for cold-start item recommendation. They learn a feature extractor on warm-start items to align feature representations with interactions, and then leverage the feature extractor to extract the feature representations of cold-start items for interaction prediction. Unfortunately, the features of cold-start items, especially the popular ones, tend to diverge from those of warm-start ones due to temporal feature shifts, preventing the feature extractor from accurately learning feature representations of cold-start items. To alleviate the impact of temporal feature shifts, we consider using Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) to enhance the generation ability of the feature extractor. Nonetheless, existing DRO methods face an inconsistency issue: the worse-case warm-start items emphasized during DRO training might not align well with the cold-start item distribution. To capture the temporal feature shifts and combat this inconsistency issue, we propose a novel temporal DRO with new optimization objectives, namely, 1) to integrate a worst-case factor to improve the worst-case performance, and 2) to devise a shifting factor to capture the shifting trend of item features and enhance the optimization of the potentially popular groups in cold-start items. Substantial experiments on three real-world datasets validate the superiority of our temporal DRO in enhancing the generalization ability of cold-start recommender models. The code is available at https://github.com/Linxyhaha/TDRO/.
title Temporally and Distributionally Robust Optimization for Cold-Start Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09901