Transform Cold-Start Users into Warm via Fused Behaviors in Large-Scale Recommendation

Recommendation for cold-start users who have very limited data is a canonical challenge in recommender systems. Existing deep recommender systems utilize user content features and behaviors to produce personalized recommendations, yet often face significant performance degradation on cold-start users compared to existing ones due to the following challenges: (1) Cold-start users may have a quite different distribution of features from existing users. (2) The few behaviors of cold-start users are hard to be exploited. In this paper, we propose a recommender system called Cold-Transformer to alleviate these problems. Specifically, we design context-based Embedding Adaption to offset the differences in feature distribution. It transforms the embedding of cold-start users into a warm state that is more like existing ones to represent corresponding user preferences. Furthermore, to exploit the few behaviors of cold-start users and characterize the user context, we propose Label Encoding that models Fused Behaviors of positive and negative feedback simultaneously, which are relatively more sufficient. Last, to perform large-scale industrial recommendations, we keep the two-tower architecture that de-couples user and target item. Extensive experiments on public and industrial datasets show that Cold-Transformer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including those that are deep coupled and less scalable.