Overhead-free User-side Recommender Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces RecCycle, a novel user-side recommender system that eliminates communication costs by recycling past recommendations, making personalized recommendations more accessible and cost-effective.

Contribution

RecCycle is the first overhead-free user-side recommender system that leverages recycled past recommendations to significantly reduce costs.

Findings

RecCycle performs comparably to state-of-the-art algorithms.

RecCycle reduces recommendation costs by a large margin.

Experimental results confirm efficiency and effectiveness.

Abstract

Traditionally, recommendation algorithms have been designed for service developers. But recently, a new paradigm called user-side recommender systems has been proposed. User-side recommender systems are built and used by end users, in sharp contrast to traditional provider-side recommender systems. Even if the official recommender system offered by the provider is not fair, end users can create and enjoy their own user-side recommender systems by themselves. Although the concept of user-side recommender systems is attractive, the problem is they require tremendous communication costs between the user and the official system. Even the most efficient user-side recommender systems require about 5 times more costs than provider-side recommender systems. Such high costs hinder the adoption of user-side recommender systems. In this paper, we propose overhead-free user-side recommender systems, RecCycle, which realizes user-side recommender systems without any communication overhead. The main idea of RecCycle is to recycle past recommendation results offered by the provider's recommender systems. The ingredients of RecCycle can be retrieved ``for free,'' and it greatly reduces the cost of user-side recommendations. In the experiments, we confirm that RecCycle performs as well as state-of-the-art user-side recommendation algorithms while RecCycle reduces costs significantly.