Enhancing Recommendation with Denoising Auxiliary Task

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised auxiliary task method to reweight noisy user interaction sequences, improving recommender system accuracy by effectively handling noise in training data.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel joint training approach that reweights noisy sequences using artificially generated noise, enhancing recommendation performance.

Findings

Improved recommendation accuracy on three datasets

Effective noise reweighting through auxiliary task

Demonstrated robustness to noisy user sequences

Abstract

The historical interaction sequences of users plays a crucial role in training recommender systems that can accurately predict user preferences. However, due to the arbitrariness of user behavior, the presence of noise in these sequences poses a challenge to predicting their next actions in recommender systems. To address this issue, our motivation is based on the observation that training noisy sequences and clean sequences (sequences without noise) with equal weights can impact the performance of the model. We propose a novel self-supervised Auxiliary Task Joint Training (ATJT) method aimed at more accurately reweighting noisy sequences in recommender systems. Specifically, we strategically select subsets from users' original sequences and perform random replacements to generate artificially replaced noisy sequences. Subsequently, we perform joint training on these artificially replaced noisy sequences and the original sequences. Through effective reweighting, we incorporate the training results of the noise recognition model into the recommender model. We evaluate our method on three datasets using a consistent base model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing self-supervised auxiliary task to enhance the base model's performance.