FArMARe: a Furniture-Aware Multi-task methodology for Recommending Apartments based on the user interests

TL;DR

FArMARe is a novel multi-task, furniture-aware model designed for text-to-apartment recommendation, effectively ranking apartments based on user interests by leveraging a new annotated dataset and cross-modal contrastive training.

Contribution

The paper introduces FArMARe, a multi-task, furniture-aware approach for apartment recommendation, and provides a new annotated dataset for indoor scene descriptions.

Findings

FArMARe outperforms baseline methods in apartment ranking accuracy.

The furniture-aware objective improves relevance in recommendations.

The collected dataset contains over 6000 annotated apartment descriptions.

Abstract

Nowadays, many people frequently have to search for new accommodation options. Searching for a suitable apartment is a time-consuming process, especially because visiting them is often mandatory to assess the truthfulness of the advertisements found on the Web. While this process could be alleviated by visiting the apartments in the metaverse, the Web-based recommendation platforms are not suitable for the task. To address this shortcoming, in this paper, we define a new problem called text-to-apartment recommendation, which requires ranking the apartments based on their relevance to a textual query expressing the user's interests. To tackle this problem, we introduce FArMARe, a multi-task approach that supports cross-modal contrastive training with a furniture-aware objective. Since public datasets related to indoor scenes do not contain detailed descriptions of the furniture, we collect and annotate a dataset comprising more than 6000 apartments. A thorough experimentation with three different methods and two raw feature extraction procedures reveals the effectiveness of FArMARe in dealing with the problem at hand.