Positional encoding is not the same as context: A study on positional encoding for sequential recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lopez-Avila, Alejo, Du, Jinhua, Shimary, Abbas, Li, Ze
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Lopez-Avila, Alejo
Du, Jinhua
Shimary, Abbas
Li, Ze
author_facet Lopez-Avila, Alejo
Du, Jinhua
Shimary, Abbas
Li, Ze
contents The rapid growth of streaming media and e-commerce has driven advancements in recommendation systems, particularly Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRS). These systems employ users' interaction histories to predict future preferences. While recent research has focused on architectural innovations like transformer blocks and feature extraction, positional encodings, crucial for capturing temporal patterns, have received less attention. These encodings are often conflated with contextual, such as the temporal footprint, which previous works tend to treat as interchangeable with positional information. This paper highlights the critical distinction between temporal footprint and positional encodings, demonstrating that the latter offers unique relational cues between items, which the temporal footprint alone cannot provide. Through extensive experimentation on eight Amazon datasets and subsets, we assess the impact of various encodings on performance metrics and training stability. We introduce new positional encodings and investigate integration strategies that improve both metrics and stability, surpassing state-of-the-art results at the time of this work's initial preprint. Importantly, we demonstrate that selecting the appropriate encoding is not only key to better performance but also essential for building robust, reliable SRS models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_10436
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Positional encoding is not the same as context: A study on positional encoding for sequential recommendation
Lopez-Avila, Alejo
Du, Jinhua
Shimary, Abbas
Li, Ze
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.m
The rapid growth of streaming media and e-commerce has driven advancements in recommendation systems, particularly Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRS). These systems employ users' interaction histories to predict future preferences. While recent research has focused on architectural innovations like transformer blocks and feature extraction, positional encodings, crucial for capturing temporal patterns, have received less attention. These encodings are often conflated with contextual, such as the temporal footprint, which previous works tend to treat as interchangeable with positional information. This paper highlights the critical distinction between temporal footprint and positional encodings, demonstrating that the latter offers unique relational cues between items, which the temporal footprint alone cannot provide. Through extensive experimentation on eight Amazon datasets and subsets, we assess the impact of various encodings on performance metrics and training stability. We introduce new positional encodings and investigate integration strategies that improve both metrics and stability, surpassing state-of-the-art results at the time of this work's initial preprint. Importantly, we demonstrate that selecting the appropriate encoding is not only key to better performance but also essential for building robust, reliable SRS models.
title Positional encoding is not the same as context: A study on positional encoding for sequential recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
I.2.m
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10436