Sustainable techniques to improve Data Quality for training image-based explanatory models for Recommender Systems
This work addresses the need for more effective and environmentally sustainable training methods for visual explanations in recommender systems, offering incremental improvements over existing approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of poor training data quality in visual-based explainability models for recommender systems, which suffer from sparsity and labeling noise, by developing three sustainable data quality improvement strategies that increased performance by 5% in ranking metrics without compromising long-term sustainability.
Visual explanations based on user-uploaded images are an effective and self-contained approach to provide transparency to Recommender Systems (RS), but intrinsic limitations of data used in this explainability paradigm cause existing approaches to use bad quality training data that is highly sparse and suffers from labelling noise. Popular training enrichment approaches like model enlargement or massive data gathering are expensive and environmentally unsustainable, thus we seek to provide better visual explanations to RS aligning with the principles of Responsible AI. In this work, we research the intersection of effective and sustainable training enrichment strategies for visual-based RS explainability models by developing three novel strategies that focus on training Data Quality: 1) selection of reliable negative training examples using Positive-unlabelled Learning, 2) transform-based data augmentation, and 3) text-to-image generative-based data augmentation. The integration of these strategies in three state-of-the-art explainability models increases 5% the performance in relevant ranking metrics of these visual-based RS explainability models without penalizing their practical long-term sustainability, as tested in multiple real-world restaurant recommendation explanation datasets.