Behavior-Contextualized Item Preference Modeling for Multi-Behavior Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces BCIPM, a novel multi-behavior recommendation model that learns user preferences within each behavior and selectively applies them to improve recommendation accuracy, especially in sparse data scenarios.

Contribution

The paper proposes a behavior-contextualized preference network that reduces noise from auxiliary behaviors and employs pre-trained embeddings to enhance performance in sparse data environments.

Findings

BCIPM outperforms state-of-the-art models on four real-world datasets.

The approach effectively reduces noise from auxiliary behaviors.

Pre-training embeddings improves recommendation accuracy in sparse data scenarios.

Abstract

In recommender systems, multi-behavior methods have demonstrated their effectiveness in mitigating issues like data sparsity, a common challenge in traditional single-behavior recommendation approaches. These methods typically infer user preferences from various auxiliary behaviors and apply them to the target behavior for recommendations. However, this direct transfer can introduce noise to the target behavior in recommendation, due to variations in user attention across different behaviors. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel approach, Behavior-Contextualized Item Preference Modeling (BCIPM), for multi-behavior recommendation. Our proposed Behavior-Contextualized Item Preference Network discerns and learns users' specific item preferences within each behavior. It then considers only those preferences relevant to the target behavior for final recommendations, significantly reducing noise from auxiliary behaviors. These auxiliary behaviors are utilized solely for training the network parameters, thereby refining the learning process without compromising the accuracy of the target behavior recommendations. To further enhance the effectiveness of BCIPM, we adopt a strategy of pre-training the initial embeddings. This step is crucial for enriching the item-aware preferences, particularly in scenarios where data related to the target behavior is sparse. Comprehensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate BCIPM's superior performance compared to several leading state-of-the-art models, validating the robustness and efficiency of our proposed approach.