Can One Embedding Fit All? A Multi-Interest Learning Paradigm Towards Improving User Interest Diversity Fairness

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhao, Yuying, Xu, Minghua, Chen, Huiyuan, Chen, Yuzhong, Cai, Yiwei, Islam, Rashidul, Wang, Yu, Derr, Tyler
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Zhao, Yuying
Xu, Minghua
Chen, Huiyuan
Chen, Yuzhong
Cai, Yiwei
Islam, Rashidul
Wang, Yu
Derr, Tyler
author_facet Zhao, Yuying
Xu, Minghua
Chen, Huiyuan
Chen, Yuzhong
Cai, Yiwei
Islam, Rashidul
Wang, Yu
Derr, Tyler
contents Recommender systems (RSs) have gained widespread applications across various domains owing to the superior ability to capture users' interests. However, the complexity and nuanced nature of users' interests, which span a wide range of diversity, pose a significant challenge in delivering fair recommendations. In practice, user preferences vary significantly; some users show a clear preference toward certain item categories, while others have a broad interest in diverse ones. Even though it is expected that all users should receive high-quality recommendations, the effectiveness of RSs in catering to this disparate interest diversity remains under-explored. In this work, we investigate whether users with varied levels of interest diversity are treated fairly. Our empirical experiments reveal an inherent disparity: users with broader interests often receive lower-quality recommendations. To mitigate this, we propose a multi-interest framework that uses multiple (virtual) interest embeddings rather than single ones to represent users. Specifically, the framework consists of stacked multi-interest representation layers, which include an interest embedding generator that derives virtual interests from shared parameters, and a center embedding aggregator that facilitates multi-hop aggregation. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in achieving better trade-off between fairness and utility across various datasets and backbones.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_13495
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can One Embedding Fit All? A Multi-Interest Learning Paradigm Towards Improving User Interest Diversity Fairness
Zhao, Yuying
Xu, Minghua
Chen, Huiyuan
Chen, Yuzhong
Cai, Yiwei
Islam, Rashidul
Wang, Yu
Derr, Tyler
Information Retrieval
Recommender systems (RSs) have gained widespread applications across various domains owing to the superior ability to capture users' interests. However, the complexity and nuanced nature of users' interests, which span a wide range of diversity, pose a significant challenge in delivering fair recommendations. In practice, user preferences vary significantly; some users show a clear preference toward certain item categories, while others have a broad interest in diverse ones. Even though it is expected that all users should receive high-quality recommendations, the effectiveness of RSs in catering to this disparate interest diversity remains under-explored. In this work, we investigate whether users with varied levels of interest diversity are treated fairly. Our empirical experiments reveal an inherent disparity: users with broader interests often receive lower-quality recommendations. To mitigate this, we propose a multi-interest framework that uses multiple (virtual) interest embeddings rather than single ones to represent users. Specifically, the framework consists of stacked multi-interest representation layers, which include an interest embedding generator that derives virtual interests from shared parameters, and a center embedding aggregator that facilitates multi-hop aggregation. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in achieving better trade-off between fairness and utility across various datasets and backbones.
title Can One Embedding Fit All? A Multi-Interest Learning Paradigm Towards Improving User Interest Diversity Fairness
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13495