Abstract
User cold-start recommendation is a long-standing challenge for recommender systems due to the fact that only a few interactions of cold-start users can be exploited. Recent studies seek to address this challenge from the perspective of meta learning, and most of them follow a manner of parameter initialization, where the model parameters can be learned by a few steps of gradient updates. While these gradient-based meta-learning models achieve promising performances to some extent, a fundamental problem of them is how to adapt the global knowledge learned from previous tasks for the recommendations of cold-start users more effectively.
In this paper, we develop a novel meta-learning recommender called task-adaptive neural process (TaNP). TaNP is a new member of the neural process family, where making recommendations for each user is associated with a corresponding stochastic process. TaNP directly maps the observed interactions of each user to a predictive distribution, sidestepping some training issues in gradient-based meta-learning models. More importantly, to balance the trade-off between model capacity and adaptation reliability, we introduce a novel task-adaptive mechanism. It enables our model to learn the relevance of different tasks and customize the global knowledge to the task-related decoder parameters for estimating user preferences. We validate TaNP on multiple benchmark datasets in different experimental settings. Empirical results demonstrate that TaNP yields consistent improvements over several state-of-the-art meta-learning recommenders.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Web Conference 2021 |
Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2021 |
Place of Publication | New York, NY |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery, Inc |
Pages | 1306-1316 |
Number of pages | 11 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450383127 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |
Event | 2021 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2021 - Ljubljana, Slovenia Duration: 19 Apr 2021 → 23 Apr 2021 |
Conference
Conference | 2021 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2021 |
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Country/Territory | Slovenia |
City | Ljubljana |
Period | 19/04/21 → 23/04/21 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright the Publisher 2021. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.Keywords
- User cold-start recommendation
- Meta learning
- Neural process