GAN inversion and shifting: recommending product modifications to sellers for better user preference

Satyadwyoom Kumar, Abhijith Sharma, Apurva Narayan

Abstract: In efforts to better accommodate users, numerous researchers have endeavored to model customer behavior, seeking to comprehend how they interact with diverse items within online platforms. This exploration has given rise to recommendation systems, which utilize customer similarity with other customers or customer-item interactions to suggest new items based on the existing item catalog. Since these systems primarily focus on enhancing customer experiences, they overlook providing insights to sellers that could help refine the aesthetics of their items and increase their customer coverage. In this study, we go beyond customer recommendations to propose a novel approach: suggesting aesthetic feedback to sellers in the form of refined item images informed by customer-item interactions learned by a recommender system from multiple consumers. These images could serve as guidance for sellers to adapt existing items to meet the dynamic preferences of multiple users simultaneously. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we design experiments showcasing how changing the number of consumers and the class of item image used affect the change in preference score. Through these experiments, we found that our methodology outperforms previous approaches by generating distinct, realistic images with user preference higher by 16.7%, thus bridging the gap between customer-centric recommendations and seller-oriented feedback.