Controllable Multi-Interest Framework for Recommendation
This addresses the problem of improving recommendation accuracy and diversity in e-commerce systems for users and platforms, representing a novel method rather than an incremental improvement.
The authors tackled the problem of sequential recommendation where unified user embeddings fail to capture multiple interests, proposing ComiRec which uses a multi-interest module to retrieve candidate items and an aggregation module with a controllable factor to balance accuracy and diversity. Experimental results on Amazon and Taobao datasets show significant improvements over state-of-the-art models, with successful deployment on Alibaba's platform.
Recently, neural networks have been widely used in e-commerce recommender systems, owing to the rapid development of deep learning. We formalize the recommender system as a sequential recommendation problem, intending to predict the next items that the user might be interacted with. Recent works usually give an overall embedding from a user's behavior sequence. However, a unified user embedding cannot reflect the user's multiple interests during a period. In this paper, we propose a novel controllable multi-interest framework for the sequential recommendation, called ComiRec. Our multi-interest module captures multiple interests from user behavior sequences, which can be exploited for retrieving candidate items from the large-scale item pool. These items are then fed into an aggregation module to obtain the overall recommendation. The aggregation module leverages a controllable factor to balance the recommendation accuracy and diversity. We conduct experiments for the sequential recommendation on two real-world datasets, Amazon and Taobao. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models. Our framework has also been successfully deployed on the offline Alibaba distributed cloud platform.