SimAug: Enhancing Recommendation with Pretrained Language Models for Dense and Balanced Data Augmentation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhao, Yuying, Yang, Xiaodong, Chen, Huiyuan, Fan, Xiran, Wang, Yu, Cai, Yiwei, Derr, Tyler
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913819111981056
author Zhao, Yuying
Yang, Xiaodong
Chen, Huiyuan
Fan, Xiran
Wang, Yu
Cai, Yiwei
Derr, Tyler
author_facet Zhao, Yuying
Yang, Xiaodong
Chen, Huiyuan
Fan, Xiran
Wang, Yu
Cai, Yiwei
Derr, Tyler
contents Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are extensively used in collaborative filtering due to their impressive effectiveness. These systems depend on interaction data to learn user and item embeddings that are crucial for recommendations. However, the data often suffers from sparsity and imbalance issues: limited observations of user-item interactions can result in sub-optimal performance, and a predominance of interactions with popular items may introduce recommendation bias. To address these challenges, we employ Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) to enhance the interaction data with textual information, leading to a denser and more balanced dataset. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation method (SimAug) based on the textual similarity from PLMs, which can be seamlessly integrated to any systems as a lightweight, plug-and-play component in the pre-processing stage. Our experiments across nine datasets consistently demonstrate improvements in both utility and fairness when training with the augmented data generated by SimAug. The code is available at https://github.com/YuyingZhao/SimAug.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_01695
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SimAug: Enhancing Recommendation with Pretrained Language Models for Dense and Balanced Data Augmentation
Zhao, Yuying
Yang, Xiaodong
Chen, Huiyuan
Fan, Xiran
Wang, Yu
Cai, Yiwei
Derr, Tyler
Information Retrieval
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are extensively used in collaborative filtering due to their impressive effectiveness. These systems depend on interaction data to learn user and item embeddings that are crucial for recommendations. However, the data often suffers from sparsity and imbalance issues: limited observations of user-item interactions can result in sub-optimal performance, and a predominance of interactions with popular items may introduce recommendation bias. To address these challenges, we employ Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) to enhance the interaction data with textual information, leading to a denser and more balanced dataset. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation method (SimAug) based on the textual similarity from PLMs, which can be seamlessly integrated to any systems as a lightweight, plug-and-play component in the pre-processing stage. Our experiments across nine datasets consistently demonstrate improvements in both utility and fairness when training with the augmented data generated by SimAug. The code is available at https://github.com/YuyingZhao/SimAug.
title SimAug: Enhancing Recommendation with Pretrained Language Models for Dense and Balanced Data Augmentation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01695