论文周报 | 推荐系统领域最新研究进展

嘿，记得给“机器学习与推荐算法”添加星标

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本周精选了10篇最新推荐系统相关的论文，方向主要包括基于表示学习、联邦学习以及自动机器学习等的推荐算法，应用涵盖会话推荐、序列推荐以及组推荐等。为节省大家时间，只整理了论文标题以及摘要，如果感兴趣可移步原文精读。

1. Single-shot Embedding Dimension Search in Recommender System, SIGIR2022

Liang Qu, Yonghong Ye, Ningzhi Tang, Lixin Zhang, Yuhui Shi, Hongzhi Yin

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.03281

As a crucial component of most modern deep recommender systems, feature embedding maps high-dimensional sparse user/item features into low-dimensional dense embeddings. However, these embeddings are usually assigned a unified dimension, which suffers from the following issues: (1) high memory usage and computation cost. (2) sub-optimal performance due to inferior dimension assignments. In order to alleviate the above issues, some works focus on automated embedding dimension search by formulating it as hyper-parameter optimization or embedding pruning problems. However, they either require well-designed search space for hyperparameters or need time-consuming optimization procedures. In this paper, we propose a Single-Shot Embedding Dimension Search method, called SSEDS, which can efficiently assign dimensions for each feature field via a single-shot embedding pruning operation while maintaining the recommendation accuracy of the model. Specifically, it introduces a criterion for identifying the importance of each embedding dimension for each feature field. As a result, SSEDS could automatically obtain mixed-dimensional embeddings by explicitly reducing redundant embedding dimensions based on the corresponding dimension importance ranking and the predefined parameter budget. Furthermore, the proposed SSEDS is model-agnostic, meaning that it could be integrated into different base recommendation models. The extensive offline experiments are conducted on two widely used public datasets for CTR prediction tasks, and the results demonstrate that SSEDS can still achieve strong recommendation performance even if it has reduced 90% parameters. Moreover, SSEDS has also been deployed on the WeChat Subscription platform for practical recommendation services. The 7-day online A/B test results show that SSEDS can significantly improve the performance of the online recommendation model.

2. Thinking inside The Box: Learning Hypercube Representations for Group Recommendation, SIGIR2022

Tong Chen, Hongzhi Yin, Jing Long, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Yang Wang, Meng Wang

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02592

As a step beyond traditional personalized recommendation, group recommendation is the task of suggesting items that can satisfy a group of users. In group recommendation, the core is to design preference aggregation functions to obtain a quality summary of all group members' preferences. Such user and group preferences are commonly represented as points in the vector space (i.e., embeddings), where multiple user embeddings are compressed into one to facilitate ranking for group-item pairs. However, the resulted group representations, as points, lack adequate flexibility and capacity to account for the multi-faceted user preferences. Also, the point embedding-based preference aggregation is a less faithful reflection of a group's decision-making proc