Purchase as Reward : Session-based Recommendation by Imagination Reconstruction

Qibing Li, Xiaolin Zheng

Abstract: One of the key challenges of session-based recommender systems is to enhance users’ purchase intentions. In this paper, we formulate the sequential interactions between user sessions and a recommender agent as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). In practice, the purchase reward is delayed and sparse, and may be buried by clicks, making it an impoverished signal for policy learning. Inspired by the prediction error minimization (PEM) and embodied cognition, we propose a simple architecture to augment reward, namely Imagination Reconstruction Network (IRN). Specifically, IRN enables the agent to explore its environment and learn predictive representations via three key components. The imagination core generates predicted trajectories, i.e., imagined items that users may purchase. The trajectory manager controls the granularity of imagined trajectories using the planning strategies, which balances the long-term rewards and short-term rewards. To optimize the action policy, the imagination-augmented executor minimizes the intrinsic imagination error of simulated trajectories by self-supervised reconstruction, while maximizing the extrinsic reward using model-free algorithms. Empirically, IRN promotes quicker adaptation to user interest, and shows improved robustness to the cold-start scenario and ultimately higher purchase performance compared to several baselines. Somewhat surprisingly, IRN using only the purchase reward achieves excellent next-click prediction performance, demonstrating that the agent can "guess what you like" via internal planning.

Keywords: recommender systems, reinforcement learning, predictive learning, self-supervised RL, model-based planning

TL;DR: We propose the IRN architecture to augment sparse and delayed purchase reward for session-based recommendation.