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Neutralizing Popularity Bias in Recommendation Models

Published:07 July 2022Publication History

ABSTRACT

Most existing recommendation models learn vectorized representations for items, i.e., item embeddings to make predictions. Item embeddings inherit popularity bias from the data, which leads to biased recommendations. We use this observation to design two simple and effective strategies, which can be flexibly plugged into different backbone recommendation models, to learn popularity neutral item representations. One strategy isolates popularity bias in one embedding direction and neutralizes the popularity direction post-training. The other strategy encourages all embedding directions to be disentangled and popularity neutral. We demonstrate that the proposed strategies outperform state-of-the-art debiasing methods on various real-world datasets, and improve recommendation quality of shallow and deep backbone models.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGIR '22: Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
      July 2022
      3569 pages
      ISBN:9781450387323
      DOI:10.1145/3477495

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      Publication History

      • Published: 7 July 2022

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