Popularity-Aware Alignment and Contrast for Mitigating Popularity Bias

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cai, Miaomiao, Chen, Lei, Wang, Yifan, Bai, Haoyue, Sun, Peijie, Wu, Le, Zhang, Min, Wang, Meng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Cai, Miaomiao
Chen, Lei
Wang, Yifan
Bai, Haoyue
Sun, Peijie
Wu, Le
Zhang, Min
Wang, Meng
author_facet Cai, Miaomiao
Chen, Lei
Wang, Yifan
Bai, Haoyue
Sun, Peijie
Wu, Le
Zhang, Min
Wang, Meng
contents Collaborative Filtering (CF) typically suffers from the significant challenge of popularity bias due to the uneven distribution of items in real-world datasets. This bias leads to a significant accuracy gap between popular and unpopular items. It not only hinders accurate user preference understanding but also exacerbates the Matthew effect in recommendation systems. To alleviate popularity bias, existing efforts focus on emphasizing unpopular items or separating the correlation between item representations and their popularity. Despite the effectiveness, existing works still face two persistent challenges: (1) how to extract common supervision signals from popular items to improve the unpopular item representations, and (2) how to alleviate the representation separation caused by popularity bias. In this work, we conduct an empirical analysis of popularity bias and propose Popularity-Aware Alignment and Contrast (PAAC) to address two challenges. Specifically, we use the common supervisory signals modeled in popular item representations and propose a novel popularity-aware supervised alignment module to learn unpopular item representations. Additionally, we suggest re-weighting the contrastive learning loss to mitigate the representation separation from a popularity-centric perspective. Finally, we validate the effectiveness and rationale of PAAC in mitigating popularity bias through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/miaomiao-cai2/KDD2024-PAAC.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_20718
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Popularity-Aware Alignment and Contrast for Mitigating Popularity Bias
Cai, Miaomiao
Chen, Lei
Wang, Yifan
Bai, Haoyue
Sun, Peijie
Wu, Le
Zhang, Min
Wang, Meng
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Collaborative Filtering (CF) typically suffers from the significant challenge of popularity bias due to the uneven distribution of items in real-world datasets. This bias leads to a significant accuracy gap between popular and unpopular items. It not only hinders accurate user preference understanding but also exacerbates the Matthew effect in recommendation systems. To alleviate popularity bias, existing efforts focus on emphasizing unpopular items or separating the correlation between item representations and their popularity. Despite the effectiveness, existing works still face two persistent challenges: (1) how to extract common supervision signals from popular items to improve the unpopular item representations, and (2) how to alleviate the representation separation caused by popularity bias. In this work, we conduct an empirical analysis of popularity bias and propose Popularity-Aware Alignment and Contrast (PAAC) to address two challenges. Specifically, we use the common supervisory signals modeled in popular item representations and propose a novel popularity-aware supervised alignment module to learn unpopular item representations. Additionally, we suggest re-weighting the contrastive learning loss to mitigate the representation separation from a popularity-centric perspective. Finally, we validate the effectiveness and rationale of PAAC in mitigating popularity bias through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/miaomiao-cai2/KDD2024-PAAC.
title Popularity-Aware Alignment and Contrast for Mitigating Popularity Bias
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20718