Scalable Cross-Entropy Loss for Sequential Recommendations with Large Item Catalogs

Scalability issue plays a crucial role in productionizing modern recommender systems. Even lightweight architectures may suffer from high computational overload due to intermediate calculations, limiting their practicality in real-world applications. Specifically, applying full Cross-Entropy (CE) loss often yields state-of-the-art performance in terms of recommendations quality. Still, it suffers from excessive GPU memory utilization when dealing with large item catalogs. This paper introduces a novel Scalable Cross-Entropy (SCE) loss function in the sequential learning setup. It approximates the CE loss for datasets with large-size catalogs, enhancing both time efficiency and memory usage without compromising recommendations quality. Unlike traditional negative sampling methods, our approach utilizes a selective GPU-efficient computation strategy, focusing on the most informative elements of the catalog, particularly those most likely to be false positives. This is achieved by approximating the softmax distribution over a subset of the model outputs through the maximum inner product search. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SCE in reducing peak memory usage by a factor of up to 100 compared to the alternatives, retaining or even exceeding their metrics values. The proposed approach also opens new perspectives for large-scale developments in different domains, such as large language models.

RECE: Reduced Cross-Entropy Loss for Large-Catalogue Sequential Recommenders

Scalability is a major challenge in modern recommender systems. In sequential recommendations, full Cross-Entropy (CE) loss achieves state-of-the-art recommendation quality but consumes excessive GPU memory with large item catalogs, limiting its practicality. Using a GPU-efficient locality-sensitive hashing-like algorithm for approximating large tensor of logits, this paper introduces a novel RECE (REduced Cross-Entropy) loss. RECE significantly reduces memory consumption while allowing one to enjoy the state-of-the-art performance of full CE loss. Experimental results on various datasets show that RECE cuts training peak memory usage by up to 12 times compared to existing methods while retaining or exceeding performance metrics of CE loss. The approach also opens up new possibilities for large-scale applications in other domains.

End-to-End Graph-Sequential Representation Learning for Accurate Recommendations

Recent recommender system advancements have focused on developing sequence-based and graph-based approaches. Both approaches proved useful in modeling intricate relationships within behavioral data, leading to promising outcomes in personalized ranking and next-item recommendation tasks while maintaining good scalability. However, they capture very different signals from data. While the former approach represents users directly through ordered interactions with recent items, the latter aims to capture indirect dependencies across the interactions graph. This paper presents a novel multi-representational learning framework exploiting these two paradigms' synergies. Our empirical evaluation on several datasets demonstrates that mutual training of sequential and graph components with the proposed framework significantly improves recommendations performance.

Mitigating Human and Computer Opinion Fraud via Contrastive Learning

We introduce the novel approach towards fake text reviews detection in collaborative filtering recommender systems. The existing algorithms concentrate on detecting the fake reviews, generated by language models and ignore the texts, written by dishonest users, mostly for monetary gains. We propose the contrastive learning-based architecture, which utilizes the user demographic characteristics, along with the text reviews, as the additional evidence against fakes. This way, we are able to account for two different types of fake reviews spamming and make the recommendation system more robust to biased reviews.

Tensor-based Sequential Learning via Hankel Matrix Representation for Next Item Recommendations

Self-attentive transformer models have recently been shown to solve the next item recommendation task very efficiently. The learned attention weights capture sequential dynamics in user behavior and generalize well. Motivated by the special structure of learned parameter space, we question if it is possible to mimic it with an alternative and more lightweight approach. We develop a new tensor factorization-based model that ingrains the structural knowledge about sequential data within the learning process. We demonstrate how certain properties of a self-attention network can be reproduced with our approach based on special Hankel matrix representation. The resulting model has a shallow linear architecture and compares competitively to its neural counterpart.

Are Quantum Computers Practical Yet? A Case for Feature Selection in Recommender Systems using Tensor Networks

Collaborative filtering models generally perform better than content-based filtering models and do not require careful feature engineering. However, in the cold-start scenario collaborative information may be scarce or even unavailable, whereas the content information may be abundant, but also noisy and expensive to acquire. Thus, selection of particular features that improve cold-start recommendations becomes an important and non-trivial task. In the recent approach by Nembrini et al., the feature selection is driven by the correlational compatibility between collaborative and content-based models. The problem is formulated as a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) which, due to its NP-hard complexity, is solved using Quantum Annealing on a quantum computer provided by D-Wave. Inspired by the reported results, we contend the idea that current quantum annealers are superior for this problem and instead focus on classical algorithms. In particular, we tackle QUBO via TTOpt, a recently proposed black-box optimizer based on tensor networks and multilinear algebra. We show the computational feasibility of this method for large problems with thousands of features, and empirically demonstrate that the solutions found are comparable to the ones obtained with D-Wave across all examined datasets.

Tensor-based Collaborative Filtering With Smooth Ratings Scale

Conventional collaborative filtering techniques don't take into consideration the effect of discrepancy in users' rating perception. Some users may rarely give 5 stars to items while others almost always assign 5 stars to the chosen item. Even if they had experience with the same items this systematic discrepancy in their evaluation style will lead to the systematic errors in the ability of recommender system to effectively extract right patterns from data. To mitigate this problem we introduce the ratings' similarity matrix which represents the dependency between different values of ratings on the population level. Hence, if on average the correlations between ratings exist, it is possible to improve the quality of proposed recommendations by off-setting the effect of either shifted down or shifted up users' rates.

Dynamic Modeling of User Preferences for Stable Recommendations

In domains where users tend to develop long-term preferences that do not change too frequently, the stability of recommendations is an important factor of the perceived quality of a recommender system. In such cases, unstable recommendations may lead to poor personalization experience and distrust, driving users away from a recommendation service. We propose an incremental learning scheme that mitigates such problems through the dynamic modeling approach. It incorporates a generalized matrix form of a partial differential equation integrator that yields a dynamic low-rank approximation of time-dependent matrices representing user preferences. The scheme allows extending the famous PureSVD approach to time-aware settings and significantly improves its stability without sacrificing the accuracy in standard top-$n$ recommendations tasks.

Performance of Hyperbolic Geometry Models on Top-N Recommendation Tasks

We introduce a simple autoencoder based on hyperbolic geometry for solving standard collaborative filtering problem. In contrast to many modern deep learning techniques, we build our solution using only a single hidden layer. Remarkably, even with such a minimalistic approach, we not only outperform the Euclidean counterpart but also achieve a competitive performance with respect to the current state-of-the-art. We additionally explore the effects of space curvature on the quality of hyperbolic models and propose an efficient data-driven method for estimating its optimal value.

Revealing the Unobserved by Linking Collaborative Behavior and Side Knowledge

We propose a tensor-based model that fuses a more granular representation of user preferences with the ability to take additional side information into account. The model relies on the concept of ordinal nature of utility, which better corresponds to actual user perception. In addition to that, unlike the majority of hybrid recommenders, the model ties side information directly to collaborative data, which not only addresses the problem of extreme data sparsity, but also allows to naturally exploit patterns in the observed behavior for a more meaningful representation of user intents. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model on several standard benchmark datasets. The general formulation of the approach imposes no restrictions on the type of observed interactions and makes it potentially applicable for joint modelling of context information along with side data.