RimiRec: Modeling Refined Multi-interest in Hierarchical Structure for Recommendation

Industrial recommender systems usually consist of the retrieval stage and the ranking stage, to handle the billion-scale of users and items. The retrieval stage retrieves candidate items relevant to user interests for recommendations and has attracted much attention. Frequently, a user shows refined multi-interests in a hierarchical structure. For example, a user likes Conan and Kuroba Kaito, which are the roles in hierarchical structure "Animation, Japanese Animation, Detective Conan". However, most existing methods ignore this hierarchical nature, and simply average the fine-grained interest information. Therefore, we propose a novel two-stage approach to explicitly modeling refined multi-interest in a hierarchical structure for recommendation. In the first hierarchical multi-interest mining stage, the hierarchical clustering and transformer-based model adaptively generate circles or sub-circles that users are interested in. In the second stage, the partition of retrieval space allows the EBR models to deal only with items within each circle and accurately capture users' refined interests. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our framework has also been deployed at Lofter.