Intent-Interest Disentanglement and Item-Aware Intent Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation

Recommender systems aim to provide personalized item recommendations by capturing user behaviors derived from their interaction history. Considering that user interactions naturally occur sequentially based on users' intents in mind, user behaviors can be interpreted as user intents. Therefore, intent-based sequential recommendations are actively studied recently to model user intents from historical interactions for a more precise user understanding beyond traditional studies that often overlook the underlying semantics behind user interactions. However, existing studies face three challenges: 1) the limited understanding of user behaviors by focusing solely on intents, 2) the lack of robustness in categorizing intents due to arbitrary fixed numbers of intent categories, and 3) the neglect of interacted items in modeling of user intents. To address these challenges, we propose Intent-Interest Disentanglement and Item-Aware Intent Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (IDCLRec). IDCLRec disentangles user behaviors into intents which are dynamic motivations and interests which are stable tastes of users for a comprehensive understanding of user behaviors. A causal cross-attention mechanism is used to identify consistent interests across interactions, while residual behaviors are modeled as intents by modeling their temporal dynamics through a similarity adjustment loss. In addition, without predefining the number of intent categories, an importance-weighted attention mechanism captures user-specific categorical intent considering the importance of intent for each interaction. Furthermore, we introduce item-aware contrastive learning which aligns intents that occurred the same interaction and aligns intent with item combinations occurred by the corresponding intent. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of IDCLRec.

Cross-channel Recommendation for Multi-channel Retail

An increasing number of brick-and-mortar retailers are expanding their channels to the online domain, transforming them into multi-channel retailers. This transition emphasizes the need for cross-channel recommender systems, aiming to enhance revenue across both offline and online channels. Given that each retail channel represents a separate domain with a unique context, this can be regarded as a cross-domain recommendation (CDR). However, the existing studies on CDR did not address the scenarios where both users and items partially overlap across multi-retail channels which we define as "cross-channel retail recommendation (CCRR)". This paper introduces our original work on CCRR using real-world datasets from a multi-channel retail store. Specifically, (1) we present significant challenges in integrating user preferences across both channels. (2) Accordingly, we propose a novel model for CCRR using a channel-wise attention mechanism to capture different user preferences for the same item on each channel. We empirically validate our model's superiority in addressing CCRR over existing models. (3) Finally, we offer implications for future research on CCRR, delving into our experiment results.