Papers

Spectral graph convolution is extremely time-consuming for large graphs, thus existing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) reconstruct the kernel by a polynomial, which is (almost) fixed. To extract features from the graph data by learning kernels, Low-pass Collaborative Filter Network (LCFN) was proposed as a new paradigm with trainable kernels. However, there are two demerits of LCFN: (1) The hypergraphs in LCFN are constructed by mining 2-hop connections of the user-item bipartite graph, thus 1-hop connections are not used, resulting in serious information loss. (2) LCFN follows the general network structure of GCNs, thus the structure is suboptimal. To address these issues, we utilize the bipartite graph to define the graph space directly and explore the best network structure based on experiments. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

poster session 1 @ blue 5, poster session 11 @ blue 5, oral session 11 @ blue 5, poster session 1, poster session 11, oral session 11

In sequential recommender system applications, it is important to develop models that can capture users' evolving interest over time to successfully recommend future items that they are likely to interact with. For users with long histories, typical models based on recurrent neural networks tend to forget important items in the distant past. Recent works have shown that storing a small sketch of past items can improve sequential recommendation tasks. However, these works all rely on static sketching policies, i.e., heuristics to select items to keep in the sketch, which are not necessarily optimal and cannot improve over time with more training data. In this paper, we propose a differentiable policy for sketching (DiPS), a framework that learns a data-driven sketching policy in an end-to-end manner together with the recommender system model to explicitly maximize recommendation quality in the future. We also propose an approximate estimator of the gradient for optimizing the sketching algorithm parameters that is computationally efficient. We verify the effectiveness of DiPS on real-world datasets under various practical settings and show that it requires up to $50\%$ fewer sketch items to reach the same predictive quality than existing sketching policies.

poster session 1 @ blue 5, poster session 11 @ blue 5, oral session 11 @ blue 5, poster session 1, poster session 11, oral session 11

Online travel platforms (OTPs), e.g., bookings.com and Ctrip.com, deliver travel experiences to online users by providing travel-related products. Although much progress has been made, the state-of-the-arts for cold-start problems are largely sub-optimal for user representation, since they do not take into account the unique characteristics exhibited from the user behaviors. In this work, we propose a State-aware Multi-aspect Interests representation Network (SMINet) for cold-start users recommendation at OTPs, which consists of a multi-aspect interests extractor, a co-attention layer, and a state-aware gating layer. The key component of the model is the multi-aspect interests extractor, which is able to extract representations for the user's multi-aspect interests.Furthermore, to learn the interactions between the user behaviors in the current session and the above multi-aspect interests, we carefully design a co-attention layer which allows the cross attentions between the two modules. Additionally, we propose a travel state-aware gating layer to attentively select the multi-aspect interests. The final user representation is obtained by fusing the three components. Comprehensive experiments conducted both offline and online demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model at user representation, especially for cold-start users, compared with state-of-the-art methods.

poster session 1 @ blue 5, poster session 11 @ blue 5, oral session 11 @ blue 5, poster session 1, poster session 11, oral session 11