CoMeta: Enhancing Meta Embeddings with Collaborative Information in Cold-start Problem of Recommendation

TL;DR

CoMeta improves cold-start recommendation by integrating collaborative information into meta embeddings, combining attribute features with user and item ID embeddings for better new item representation.

Contribution

The paper introduces CoMeta, a novel method that enhances meta embeddings with collaborative information, addressing limitations of existing meta learning approaches in cold-start scenarios.

Findings

CoMeta outperforms baseline models on two public datasets.

Incorporating collaborative information improves recommendation accuracy.

CoMeta demonstrates high compatibility with existing recommendation frameworks.

Abstract

The cold-start problem is quite challenging for existing recommendation models. Specifically, for the new items with only a few interactions, their ID embeddings are trained inadequately, leading to poor recommendation performance. Some recent studies introduce meta learning to solve the cold-start problem by generating meta embeddings for new items as their initial ID embeddings. However, we argue that the capability of these methods is limited, because they mainly utilize item attribute features which only contain little information, but ignore the useful collaborative information contained in the ID embeddings of users and old items. To tackle this issue, we propose CoMeta to enhance the meta embeddings with the collaborative information. CoMeta consists of two submodules: B-EG and S-EG. Specifically, for a new item: B-EG calculates the similarity-based weighted sum of the ID embeddings of old items as its base embedding; S-EG generates its shift embedding not only with its attribute features but also with the average ID embedding of the users who interacted with it. The final meta embedding is obtained by adding up the base embedding and the shift embedding. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets. The experimental results demonstrate both the effectiveness and the compatibility of CoMeta.