Mitigating Recommendation Biases via Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity in Representation Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel representation learning framework, AURL, that mitigates recommendation biases by aligning group distributions and maintaining uniformity, improving fairness without sacrificing accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a new debiasing method using group-alignment and global-uniformity regularizers in representation learning, addressing issues of group-discrepancy and global-collapse.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on three real datasets.

Effectively reduces popularity bias and improves long-tail item recommendations.

Compatible with various recommendation backbones.

Abstract

Collaborative Filtering~(CF) plays a crucial role in modern recommender systems, leveraging historical user-item interactions to provide personalized suggestions. However, CF-based methods often encounter biases due to imbalances in training data. This phenomenon makes CF-based methods tend to prioritize recommending popular items and performing unsatisfactorily on inactive users. Existing works address this issue by rebalancing training samples, reranking recommendation results, or making the modeling process robust to the bias. Despite their effectiveness, these approaches can compromise accuracy or be sensitive to weighting strategies, making them challenging to train. In this paper, we deeply analyze the causes and effects of the biases and propose a framework to alleviate biases in recommendation from the perspective of representation distribution, namely Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity Enhanced Representation Learning for Debiasing Recommendation (AURL). Specifically, we identify two significant problems in the representation distribution of users and items, namely group-discrepancy and global-collapse. These two problems directly lead to biases in the recommendation results. To this end, we propose two simple but effective regularizers in the representation space, respectively named group-alignment and global-uniformity. The goal of group-alignment is to bring the representation distribution of long-tail entities closer to that of popular entities, while global-uniformity aims to preserve the information of entities as much as possible by evenly distributing representations. Our method directly optimizes both the group-alignment and global-uniformity regularization terms to mitigate recommendation biases. Extensive experiments on three real datasets and various recommendation backbones verify the superiority of our proposed framework.