A Geometric Approach to Personalized Recommendation with Set-Theoretic Constraints Using Box Embeddings

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Dasgupta, Shib, Boratko, Michael, McCallum, Andrew
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Dasgupta, Shib
Boratko, Michael
McCallum, Andrew
author_facet Dasgupta, Shib
Boratko, Michael
McCallum, Andrew
contents Personalized item recommendation typically suffers from data sparsity, which is most often addressed by learning vector representations of users and items via low-rank matrix factorization. While this effectively densifies the matrix by assuming users and movies can be represented by linearly dependent latent features, it does not capture more complicated interactions. For example, vector representations struggle with set-theoretic relationships, such as negation and intersection, e.g. recommending a movie that is "comedy and action, but not romance". In this work, we formulate the problem of personalized item recommendation as matrix completion where rows are set-theoretically dependent. To capture this set-theoretic dependence we represent each user and attribute by a hyper-rectangle or box (i.e. a Cartesian product of intervals). Box embeddings can intuitively be understood as trainable Venn diagrams, and thus not only inherently represent similarity (via the Jaccard index), but also naturally and faithfully support arbitrary set-theoretic relationships. Queries involving set-theoretic constraints can be efficiently computed directly on the embedding space by performing geometric operations on the representations. We empirically demonstrate the superiority of box embeddings over vector-based neural methods on both simple and complex item recommendation queries by up to 30 \% overall.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_10875
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Geometric Approach to Personalized Recommendation with Set-Theoretic Constraints Using Box Embeddings
Dasgupta, Shib
Boratko, Michael
McCallum, Andrew
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Personalized item recommendation typically suffers from data sparsity, which is most often addressed by learning vector representations of users and items via low-rank matrix factorization. While this effectively densifies the matrix by assuming users and movies can be represented by linearly dependent latent features, it does not capture more complicated interactions. For example, vector representations struggle with set-theoretic relationships, such as negation and intersection, e.g. recommending a movie that is "comedy and action, but not romance". In this work, we formulate the problem of personalized item recommendation as matrix completion where rows are set-theoretically dependent. To capture this set-theoretic dependence we represent each user and attribute by a hyper-rectangle or box (i.e. a Cartesian product of intervals). Box embeddings can intuitively be understood as trainable Venn diagrams, and thus not only inherently represent similarity (via the Jaccard index), but also naturally and faithfully support arbitrary set-theoretic relationships. Queries involving set-theoretic constraints can be efficiently computed directly on the embedding space by performing geometric operations on the representations. We empirically demonstrate the superiority of box embeddings over vector-based neural methods on both simple and complex item recommendation queries by up to 30 \% overall.
title A Geometric Approach to Personalized Recommendation with Set-Theoretic Constraints Using Box Embeddings
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10875