Exploitation or Exploration Next? User Behavior Decoupling and Emerging Intent Modeling for Next-Item Recommendation

Nengjun Zhu, Lingdan Sun, Xiangfeng Luo, Jian Cao, Qi Zhang, Xinjiang Lu

Abstract: Recent trends in next-item recommendation systems have focused on modeling user intents. Traditional methods often extract users' inherent intents from the most representative items in a session, overlooking “unexpected items” that deviate from the majority in various contextual aspects. These unexpected items, frequently present, can be crucial indicators of a user's inclination towards exploring new options, signaling emerging intents that warrant significant attention. In response, we introduce DbMei, a novel approach that decouples user behaviors and emphasizes the modeling of emerging intents. DbMei distinguishes between two user behavior types: “focused shopping”, which aligns with users' inherent intents, and”wandering shopping”, which aligns with emerging intents. Focused shopping is analyzed using topic modeling and hypergraph learning while wandering shopping is explored through session neighbor retrieval. An exploitation-exploration mechanism is employed to determine the behavioral probability distribution for upcoming items. This integrated modeling of focused and wandering shopping behaviors drives our recommendation process. Extensive empirical studies on two real-world datasets, Amazon-KDD and Beauty, showcase DbMei's superiority over leading methods regarding Recall and MRR metrics. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sunlingdan-123/DbMei.