Diversity Regularized Interests Modeling for Recommender Systems
This work addresses the issue of sub-optimal recommendations due to overlapping user interests in e-commerce, representing an incremental improvement over existing multi-interest methods.
The paper tackles the problem of homogeneous user interest vectors in multi-interest recommender systems by proposing a diversity regularized modeling method, which achieves superior performance on public and industrial datasets.
With the rapid development of E-commerce and the increase in the quantity of items, users are presented with more items hence their interests broaden. It is increasingly difficult to model user intentions with traditional methods, which model the user's preference for an item by combining a single user vector and an item vector. Recently, some methods are proposed to generate multiple user interest vectors and achieve better performance compared to traditional methods. However, empirical studies demonstrate that vectors generated from these multi-interests methods are sometimes homogeneous, which may lead to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel method of Diversity Regularized Interests Modeling (DRIM) for Recommender Systems. We apply a capsule network in a multi-interest extractor to generate multiple user interest vectors. Each interest of the user should have a certain degree of distinction, thus we introduce three strategies as the diversity regularized separator to separate multiple user interest vectors. Experimental results on public and industrial data sets demonstrate the ability of the model to capture different interests of a user and the superior performance of the proposed approach.