A Worrying Reproducibility Study of Intent-Aware Recommendation Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Shehzad, Faisal, Dacrema, Maurizio Ferrari, Jannach, Dietmar
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Shehzad, Faisal
Dacrema, Maurizio Ferrari
Jannach, Dietmar
author_facet Shehzad, Faisal
Dacrema, Maurizio Ferrari
Jannach, Dietmar
contents Lately, we have observed a growing interest in intent-aware recommender systems (IARS). The promise of such systems is that they are capable of generating better recommendations by predicting and considering the underlying motivations and short-term goals of consumers. From a technical perspective, various sophisticated neural models were recently proposed in this emerging and promising area. In the broader context of complex neural recommendation models, a growing number of research works unfortunately indicates that (i) reproducing such works is often difficult and (ii) that the true benefits of such models may be limited in reality, e.g., because the reported improvements were obtained through comparisons with untuned or weak baselines. In this work, we investigate if recent research in IARS is similarly affected by such problems. Specifically, we tried to reproduce five contemporary IARS models that were published in top-level outlets, and we benchmarked them against a number of traditional non-neural recommendation models. In two of the cases, running the provided code with the optimal hyperparameters reported in the paper did not yield the results reported in the paper. Worryingly, we find that all examined IARS approaches are consistently outperformed by at least one traditional model. These findings point to sustained methodological issues and to a pressing need for more rigorous scholarly practices.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10143
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Worrying Reproducibility Study of Intent-Aware Recommendation Models
Shehzad, Faisal
Dacrema, Maurizio Ferrari
Jannach, Dietmar
Information Retrieval
Lately, we have observed a growing interest in intent-aware recommender systems (IARS). The promise of such systems is that they are capable of generating better recommendations by predicting and considering the underlying motivations and short-term goals of consumers. From a technical perspective, various sophisticated neural models were recently proposed in this emerging and promising area. In the broader context of complex neural recommendation models, a growing number of research works unfortunately indicates that (i) reproducing such works is often difficult and (ii) that the true benefits of such models may be limited in reality, e.g., because the reported improvements were obtained through comparisons with untuned or weak baselines. In this work, we investigate if recent research in IARS is similarly affected by such problems. Specifically, we tried to reproduce five contemporary IARS models that were published in top-level outlets, and we benchmarked them against a number of traditional non-neural recommendation models. In two of the cases, running the provided code with the optimal hyperparameters reported in the paper did not yield the results reported in the paper. Worryingly, we find that all examined IARS approaches are consistently outperformed by at least one traditional model. These findings point to sustained methodological issues and to a pressing need for more rigorous scholarly practices.
title A Worrying Reproducibility Study of Intent-Aware Recommendation Models
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10143