TEARS: Textual Representations for Scrutable Recommendations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Penaloza, Emiliano, Gouvert, Olivier, Wu, Haolun, Charlin, Laurent
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Penaloza, Emiliano
Gouvert, Olivier
Wu, Haolun
Charlin, Laurent
author_facet Penaloza, Emiliano
Gouvert, Olivier
Wu, Haolun
Charlin, Laurent
contents Traditional recommender systems rely on high-dimensional (latent) embeddings for modeling user-item interactions, often resulting in opaque representations that lack interpretability. Moreover, these systems offer limited control to users over their recommendations. Inspired by recent work, we introduce TExtuAl Representations for Scrutable recommendations (TEARS) to address these challenges. Instead of representing a user's interests through a latent embedding, TEARS encodes them in natural text, providing transparency and allowing users to edit them. To do so, TEARS uses a modern LLM to generate user summaries based on user preferences. We find the summaries capture user preferences uniquely. Using these summaries, we take a hybrid approach where we use an optimal transport procedure to align the summaries' representation with the learned representation of a standard VAE for collaborative filtering. We find this approach can surpass the performance of three popular VAE models while providing user-controllable recommendations. We also analyze the controllability of TEARS through three simulated user tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of a user editing its summary.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_19302
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TEARS: Textual Representations for Scrutable Recommendations
Penaloza, Emiliano
Gouvert, Olivier
Wu, Haolun
Charlin, Laurent
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Traditional recommender systems rely on high-dimensional (latent) embeddings for modeling user-item interactions, often resulting in opaque representations that lack interpretability. Moreover, these systems offer limited control to users over their recommendations. Inspired by recent work, we introduce TExtuAl Representations for Scrutable recommendations (TEARS) to address these challenges. Instead of representing a user's interests through a latent embedding, TEARS encodes them in natural text, providing transparency and allowing users to edit them. To do so, TEARS uses a modern LLM to generate user summaries based on user preferences. We find the summaries capture user preferences uniquely. Using these summaries, we take a hybrid approach where we use an optimal transport procedure to align the summaries' representation with the learned representation of a standard VAE for collaborative filtering. We find this approach can surpass the performance of three popular VAE models while providing user-controllable recommendations. We also analyze the controllability of TEARS through three simulated user tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of a user editing its summary.
title TEARS: Textual Representations for Scrutable Recommendations
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.19302