Visually Explainable Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visually explainable recommendation system using attentive neural networks that personalize visual highlights to explain why items are recommended, improving both recommendation accuracy and interpretability.

Contribution

It proposes a novel attentive neural network model that provides personalized visual explanations for recommendations, enhancing explainability without sacrificing performance.

Findings

Improves recommendation accuracy with visual explanations

Provides persuasive visual highlights for user understanding

Enhances interpretability of recommendation systems

Abstract

Images account for a significant part of user decisions in many application scenarios, such as product images in e-commerce, or user image posts in social networks. It is intuitive that user preferences on the visual patterns of image (e.g., hue, texture, color, etc) can be highly personalized, and this provides us with highly discriminative features to make personalized recommendations. Previous work that takes advantage of images for recommendation usually transforms the images into latent representation vectors, which are adopted by a recommendation component to assist personalized user/item profiling and recommendation. However, such vectors are hardly useful in terms of providing visual explanations to users about why a particular item is recommended, and thus weakens the explainability of recommendation systems. As a step towards explainable recommendation models, we propose visually explainable recommendation based on attentive neural networks to model the user attention on images, under the supervision of both implicit feedback and textual reviews. By this, we can not only provide recommendation results to the users, but also tell the users why an item is recommended by providing intuitive visual highlights in a personalized manner. Experimental results show that our models are not only able to improve the recommendation performance, but also can provide persuasive visual explanations for the users to take the recommendations.