Owing to the superiority of GNN in learning on graph data and its efficacy in capturing collaborative signals and sequential patterns, utilizing GNN techniques in recommender systems has gain increasing interests in academia and industry. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the most recent works on GNN-based recommender systems. We proposed a classification scheme for organizing existing works. For each category, we briefly clarify the main issues, and detail the corresponding strategies adopted by the representative models. We also discuss the advantages and limitations of the existing strategies. Furthermore, we suggest several promising directions for future researches. We hope this survey can provide readers with a general understanding of the recent progress in this field, and shed some light on future developments.

Graph Neural Networks in Recommender Systems: A Survey

Recently, significant progress has been made in sequential recommendation with deep learning. Existing neural sequential recommendation models usually rely on the item prediction loss to learn model parameters or data representations. However, the model trained with this loss is prone to suffer from data sparsity problem. Since it overemphasizes the final performance, the association or fusion between context data and sequence data has not been well captured and utilized for sequential recommendation. To tackle this problem, we propose the model S^3-Rec, which stands for Self-Supervised learning for Sequential Recommendation, based on the self-attentive neural architecture. The main idea of our approach is to utilize the intrinsic data correlation to derive self-supervision signals and enhance the data representations via pre-training methods for improving sequential recommendation. For our task, we devise four auxiliary self-supervised objectives to learn the correlations among attribute, item, subsequence, and sequence by utilizing the mutual information maximization (MIM) principle. MIM provides a unified way to characterize the correlation between different types of data, which is particularly suitable in our scenario. Extensive experiments conducted on six real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art methods, especially when only limited training data is available. Besides, we extend our self-supervised learning method to other recommendation models, which also improve their performance.

S^3-Rec: Self-Supervised Learning for Sequential Recommendation with Mutual Information Maximization

Deep learning based methods have been widely used in industrial recommendation systems (RSs). Previous works adopt an Embedding&MLP paradigm: raw features are embedded into low-dimensional vectors, which are then fed on to MLP for final recommendations. However, most of these works just concatenate different features, ignoring the sequential nature of users' behaviors. In this paper, we propose to use the powerful Transformer model to capture the sequential signals underlying users' behavior sequences for recommendation in Alibaba. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model, which is then deployed online at Taobao and obtain significant improvements in online Click-Through-Rate (CTR) comparing to two baselines.

Behavior sequence transformer for e-commerce recommendation in Alibaba

Recently, significant progress has been made in sequential recommendation with deep learning. Existing neural sequential recommendation models usually rely on the item prediction loss to learn model parameters or data representations. However, the model trained with this loss is prone to suffer from data sparsity problem. Since it overemphasizes the final performance, the association or fusion between context data and sequence data has not been well captured and utilized for sequential recommendation. To tackle this problem, we propose the model S3-Rec, which stands for Self-Supervised learning for Sequential Recommendation, based on the self-attentive neural architecture. The main idea of our approach is to utilize the intrinsic data correlation to derive self-supervision signals and enhance the data representations via pre-training methods for improving sequential recommendation. For our task, we devise four auxiliary self-supervised objectives to learn the correlations among attribute, item, subsequence, and sequence by utilizing the mutual information maximization (MIM) principle. MIM provides a unified way to characterize the correlation between different types of data, which is particularly suitable in our scenario. Extensive experiments conducted on six real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over existing state-of-the-art methods, especially when only limited training data is available. Besides, we extend our self-supervised learning method to other recommendation models, which also improve their performance.

S3-Rec: Self-Supervised Learning for Sequential Recommendation with Mutual Information Maximization

There is an increasing attention on next-item recommendation systems to infer the dynamic user preferences with sequential user interactions. While the semantics of an item can change over time and across users, the item correlations defined by user interactions in the short term can be distilled to capture such change, and help in uncovering the dynamic user preferences. Thus, we are motivated to develop a novel next-item recommendation framework empowered by sequential hypergraphs. Specifically, the framework: (i) adopts hypergraph to represent the short-term item correlations and applies multiple convolutional layers to capture multi-order connections in the hypergraph; (ii) models the connections between different time periods with a residual gating layer; and (iii) is equipped with a fusion layer to incorporate both the dynamic item embedding and short-term user intent to the representation of each interaction before feeding it into the self-attention layer for dynamic user modeling. Through experiments on datasets from the ecommerce sites Amazon and Etsy and the information sharing platform Goodreads, the proposed model can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art in predicting the next interesting item for each user.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3397271.3401133

Next-item Recommendation with Sequential Hypergraphs

Modeling users' dynamic preferences from their historical behaviors is challenging and crucial for recommendation systems. Previous methods employ sequential neural networks to encode users' historical interactions from left to right into hidden representations for making recommendations. Despite their effectiveness, we argue that such left-to-right unidirectional models are sub-optimal due to the limitations including: \begin enumerate* [label=series\itshape\alph*\upshape)] \item unidirectional architectures restrict the power of hidden representation in users' behavior sequences; \item they often assume a rigidly ordered sequence which is not always practical. \end enumerate* To address these limitations, we proposed a sequential recommendation model called BERT4Rec, which employs the deep bidirectional self-attention to model user behavior sequences. To avoid the information leakage and efficiently train the bidirectional model, we adopt the Cloze objective to sequential recommendation, predicting the random masked items in the sequence by jointly conditioning on their left and right context. In this way, we learn a bidirectional representation model to make recommendations by allowing each item in user historical behaviors to fuse information from both left and right sides. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential models consistently.

BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer

Modeling users' dynamic and evolving preferences from their historical behaviors is challenging and crucial for recommendation systems. Previous methods employ sequential neural networks (e.g., Recurrent Neural Network) to encode users' historical interactions from left to right into hidden representations for making recommendations. Although these methods achieve satisfactory results, they often assume a rigidly ordered sequence which is not always practical. We argue that such left-to-right unidirectional architectures restrict the power of the historical sequence representations. For this purpose, we introduce a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for sequential Recommendation (BERT4Rec). However, jointly conditioning on both left and right context in deep bidirectional model would make the training become trivial since each item can indirectly "see the target item". To address this problem, we train the bidirectional model using the Cloze task, predicting the masked items in the sequence by jointly conditioning on their left and right context. Comparing with predicting the next item at each position in a sequence, the Cloze task can produce more samples to train a more powerful bidirectional model. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential models consistently.

Ranking is a core task in recommender systems, which aims at providing an ordered list of items to users. Typically, a ranking function is learned from the labeled dataset to optimize the global performance, which produces a ranking score for each individual item. However, it may be sub-optimal because the scoring function applies to each item individually and does not explicitly consider the mutual influence between items, as well as the differences of users' preferences or intents. Therefore, we propose a personalized re-ranking model for recommender systems. The proposed re-ranking model can be easily deployed as a follow-up modular after any ranking algorithm, by directly using the existing ranking feature vectors. It directly optimizes the whole recommendation list by employing a transformer structure to efficiently encode the information of all items in the list. Specifically, the Transformer applies a self-attention mechanism that directly models the global relationships between any pair of items in the whole list. We confirm that the performance can be further improved by introducing pre-trained embedding to learn personalized encoding functions for different users. Experimental results on both offline benchmarks and real-world online e-commerce systems demonstrate the significant improvements of the proposed re-ranking model.

Personalized re-ranking for recommendation

Features play an important role in the prediction tasks of e-commerce recommendations. To guarantee the consistency of off-line training and on-line serving, we usually utilize the same features that are both available. However, the consistency in turn neglects some discriminative features. For example, when estimating the conversion rate (CVR), i.e., the probability that a user would purchase the item if she clicked it, features like dwell time on the item detailed page are informative. However, CVR prediction should be conducted for on-line ranking before the click happens. Thus we cannot get such post-event features during serving. We define the features that are discriminative but only available during training as the privileged features. Inspired by the distillation techniques which bridge the gap between training and inference, in this work, we propose privileged features distillation (PFD). We train two models, i.e., a student model that is the same as the original one and a teacher model that additionally utilizes the privileged features. Knowledge distilled from the more accurate teacher is transferred to the student, which helps to improve its prediction accuracy. During serving, only the student part is extracted and it relies on no privileged features. We conduct experiments on two fundamental prediction tasks at Taobao recommendations, i.e., click-through rate (CTR) at coarse-grained ranking and CVR at fine-grained ranking. By distilling the interacted features that are prohibited during serving for CTR and the post-event features for CVR, we achieve significant improvements over their strong baselines. During the on-line A/B tests, the click metric is improved by +5.0% in the CTR task. And the conversion metric is improved by +2.3% in the CVR task. Besides, by addressing several issues of training PFD, we obtain comparable training speed as the baselines without any distillation.

Jian Wu

Papers

BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer

BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer

Personalized re-ranking for recommendation

Privileged Features Distillation at Taobao Recommendations

Personalized Re-ranking for Recommendation