Your Causal Self-Attentive Recommender Hosts a Lonely Neighborhood

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Wang, Yueqi, He, Zhankui, Yue, Zhenrui, McAuley, Julian, Wang, Dong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866929652890599424
author Wang, Yueqi
He, Zhankui
Yue, Zhenrui
McAuley, Julian
Wang, Dong
author_facet Wang, Yueqi
He, Zhankui
Yue, Zhenrui
McAuley, Julian
Wang, Dong
contents In the context of sequential recommendation, a pivotal issue pertains to the comparative analysis between bi-directional/auto-encoding (AE) and uni-directional/auto-regressive (AR) attention mechanisms, where the conclusions regarding architectural and performance superiority remain inconclusive. Previous efforts in such comparisons primarily involve summarizing existing works to identify a consensus or conducting ablation studies on peripheral modeling techniques, such as choices of loss functions. However, far fewer efforts have been made in (1) theoretical and (2) extensive empirical analysis of the self-attention module, the very pivotal structure on which performance and designing insights should be anchored. In this work, we first provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of AE/AR attention matrix in the aspect of (1) sparse local inductive bias, a.k.a neighborhood effects, and (2) low rank approximation. Analytical metrics reveal that the AR attention exhibits sparse neighborhood effects suitable for generally sparse recommendation scenarios. Secondly, to support our theoretical analysis, we conduct extensive empirical experiments on comparing AE/AR attention on five popular benchmarks with AR performing better overall. Empirical results reported are based on our experimental pipeline named Modularized Design Space for Self-Attentive Recommender (ModSAR), supporting adaptive hyperparameter tuning, modularized design space and HuggingFace plug-ins. We invite the recommendation community to utilize/contribute to ModSAR to (1) conduct more module/model-level examining beyond AE/AR comparison and (2) accelerate state-of-the-art model design. Lastly, we shed light on future design choices for performant self-attentive recommenders. We make our pipeline implementation and data available at https://github.com/yueqirex/SAR-Check.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_02048
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Your Causal Self-Attentive Recommender Hosts a Lonely Neighborhood
Wang, Yueqi
He, Zhankui
Yue, Zhenrui
McAuley, Julian
Wang, Dong
Information Retrieval
In the context of sequential recommendation, a pivotal issue pertains to the comparative analysis between bi-directional/auto-encoding (AE) and uni-directional/auto-regressive (AR) attention mechanisms, where the conclusions regarding architectural and performance superiority remain inconclusive. Previous efforts in such comparisons primarily involve summarizing existing works to identify a consensus or conducting ablation studies on peripheral modeling techniques, such as choices of loss functions. However, far fewer efforts have been made in (1) theoretical and (2) extensive empirical analysis of the self-attention module, the very pivotal structure on which performance and designing insights should be anchored. In this work, we first provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of AE/AR attention matrix in the aspect of (1) sparse local inductive bias, a.k.a neighborhood effects, and (2) low rank approximation. Analytical metrics reveal that the AR attention exhibits sparse neighborhood effects suitable for generally sparse recommendation scenarios. Secondly, to support our theoretical analysis, we conduct extensive empirical experiments on comparing AE/AR attention on five popular benchmarks with AR performing better overall. Empirical results reported are based on our experimental pipeline named Modularized Design Space for Self-Attentive Recommender (ModSAR), supporting adaptive hyperparameter tuning, modularized design space and HuggingFace plug-ins. We invite the recommendation community to utilize/contribute to ModSAR to (1) conduct more module/model-level examining beyond AE/AR comparison and (2) accelerate state-of-the-art model design. Lastly, we shed light on future design choices for performant self-attentive recommenders. We make our pipeline implementation and data available at https://github.com/yueqirex/SAR-Check.
title Your Causal Self-Attentive Recommender Hosts a Lonely Neighborhood
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02048