Generation Meets Recommendation: Proposing Novel Items for Groups of Users
This addresses the challenge for organizations like movie studios or manufacturers in creating non-existent items to meet varied user preferences, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing generative models.
The paper tackles the problem of generating new items to satisfy groups of users with different preferences, proposing a method that jointly identifies plausible new items and appealing user groups, with evaluation on synthetic and real-world datasets showing promising results such as small and diverse sets of novel items.
Consider a movie studio aiming to produce a set of new movies for summer release: What types of movies it should produce? Who would the movies appeal to? How many movies should it make? Similar issues are encountered by a variety of organizations, e.g., mobile-phone manufacturers and online magazines, who have to create new (non-existent) items to satisfy groups of users with different preferences. In this paper, we present a joint problem formalization of these interrelated issues, and propose generative methods that address these questions simultaneously. Specifically, we leverage the latent space obtained by training a deep generative model---the Variational Autoencoder (VAE)---via a loss function that incorporates both rating performance and item reconstruction terms. We then apply a greedy search algorithm that utilizes this learned latent space to jointly obtain K plausible new items, and user groups that would find the items appealing. An evaluation of our methods on a synthetic dataset indicates that our approach is able to generate novel items similar to highly-desirable unobserved items. As case studies on real-world data, we applied our method on the MART abstract art and Movielens Tag Genome dataset, which resulted in promising results: small and diverse sets of novel items.