Enhancing Recommendation Accuracy and Diversity with Box Embedding: A Universal Framework

Cheng Wu, Shaoyun Shi, Chaokun Wang, Ziyang Liu, wang Peng, wenjin wu, Dongying Kong, Han Li, Kun Gai

Keywords: Recommender System, Box Embedding, Graph Neural Networks

TL;DR: We explore a new model based on box embedding to imporve both recommendation accuracy and diversity, and propose two new metrics to evaluate recommendation diversity.

Abstract: Recommender systems have emerged as an indispensable mean to meet personalized interests of users and alleviate information overload. Despite the great success, accuracy-oriented recommendation models are creating information cocoons, i.e., it is becoming increasingly difficult for users to see other items they might be interested in. Although recent studies start paying attention to enhancing recommendation diversity, models based on point embedding fail to describe the range of user preferences and item features well, which is essential for diversified matching. To this end, we propose LCD-UC , a novel recommendation framework based on box embedding to improve recommendation diversity with the recommendation accuracy maintained. Specifically, LCD-UC creates hypercubes to represent users and items using box embedding for high model flexibility and expressiveness. Then, a hypercube similarity scoring function is designed to measure the similarity between hypercubes representing users and items. To make a balance between the accuracy and diversity of recommendations and achieve personalized diversity needs, we further develop a user-item pairwise attention mechanism as well as a user uncertainty masking mechanism in LCD-UC. Besides, we present two new metrics for better evaluation on recommendation diversity, which address the issue that existing metrics only consider the coverage of categories while ignore the frequency of categories. The extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that LCD-UC can improve both recommendation accuracy and diversity over three base models, and is superior to six state-of-the-art recommendation models. An online 10-day AB test also demonstrates that LCD-UC can improve the performance of a real-world advertising system.

Track: User Modeling and Recommendation

Submission Guidelines Scope: Yes

Submission Guidelines Blind: Yes

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Student Author: Yes

Submission Number: 1567