skip to main content
10.1145/3485447.3512120acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesthewebconfConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Stochastic-Expert Variational Autoencoder for Collaborative Filtering

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Motivated by the recent successes of deep generative models used for collaborative filtering, we propose a novel framework of VAE for collaborative filtering using multiple experts and stochastic expert selection, which allows the model to learn a richer and more complex latent representation of user preferences. In our method, individual experts are sampled stochastically at each user-item interaction which can effectively utilize the variability among multiple experts. While we propose this framework in the context of collaborative filtering, the proposed stochastic expert technique can be used to enhance VAEs in general beyond the application of collaborative filtering. Hence, this novel technique can be of independent interest. We comprehensively evaluate our proposed method, Stochastic-Expert Variational Autoencoder (SE-VAE) on numerical experiments on the real-world benchmark datasets from MovieLens and Netflix and show that it consistently outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods across all metrics. Our proposed stochastic expert framework is generic and adaptable to any VAE architecture. The experimental results show that the adaptations to various architectures provided performance gains over the existing methods.

References

[1]
Daniel Billsus, Michael J Pazzani, 1998. Learning collaborative information filters. In Icml, Vol. 98. 46–54.
[2]
Samuel J. Gershman and Noah D. Goodman. 2014. Amortized Inference in Probabilistic Reasoning. Cognitive Science 36(2014).
[3]
Prem Gopalan, Jake M Hofman, and David M Blei. 2015. Scalable Recommendation with Hierarchical Poisson Factorization. In UAI. 326–335.
[4]
Irina Higgins, Loïc Matthey, Arka Pal, Christopher P. Burgess, Xavier Glorot, Matthew M. Botvinick, Shakir Mohamed, and Alexander Lerchner. 2017. beta-VAE: Learning Basic Visual Concepts with a Constrained Variational Framework. In ICLR.
[5]
Matthew D. Hoffman, David M. Blei, Chong Wang, and John Paisley. 2013. Stochastic Variational Inference. Journal of Machine Learning Research 14, 4 (2013), 1303–1347. http://jmlr.org/papers/v14/hoffman13a.html
[6]
Yifan Hu, Yehuda Koren, and Chris Volinsky. 2008. Collaborative filtering for implicit feedback datasets. In 2008 Eighth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. Ieee, 263–272.
[7]
Yifan Hu, Yehuda Koren, and Chris Volinsky. 2008. Collaborative Filtering for Implicit Feedback Datasets. In 2008 Eighth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. 263–272. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDM.2008.22
[8]
Eric Jang, Shixiang Gu, and Ben Poole. 2017. Categorical Reparametrization with Gumbel-Softmax. In Proceedings International Conference on Learning Representations 2017. OpenReviews.net. https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rkE3y85ee
[9]
Daeryong Kim and Bongwon Suh. 2019. Enhancing VAEs for Collaborative Filtering: Flexible Priors & Gating Mechanisms. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (Copenhagen, Denmark) (RecSys ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 403–407. https://doi.org/10.1145/3298689.3347015
[10]
Diederik P. Kingma and Max Welling. 2014. Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes. In 2nd International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2014, Banff, AB, Canada, April 14-16, 2014, Conference Track Proceedings, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun (Eds.). http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6114
[11]
John Lafferty and David Blei. 2006. Correlated Topic Models. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Y. Weiss, B. Schölkopf, and J. Platt (Eds.). Vol. 18. MIT Press. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2005/file/9e82757e9a1c12cb710ad680db11f6f1-Paper.pdf
[12]
Daniel D Lee and H Sebastian Seung. 1999. Learning the parts of objects by non-negative matrix factorization. Nature 401, 6755 (1999), 788–791.
[13]
Dawen Liang, Jaan Altosaar, Laurent Charlin, and David M Blei. 2016. Factorization meets the item embedding: Regularizing matrix factorization with item co-occurrence. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on recommender systems. 59–66.
[14]
Dawen Liang, Rahul G. Krishnan, Matthew D. Hoffman, and Tony Jebara. 2018. Variational Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering. In Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference (Lyon, France) (WWW ’18). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE, 689–698. https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186150
[15]
Sam Lobel, Chunyuan Li, Jianfeng Gao, and Lawrence Carin. 2020. RaCT: Toward Amortized Ranking-Critical Training For Collaborative Filtering. In International Conference on Learning Representations.
[16]
Andriy Mnih and Russ R Salakhutdinov. 2008. Probabilistic matrix factorization. In Advances in neural information processing systems. 1257–1264.
[17]
Xia Ning and George Karypis. 2011. SLIM: Sparse Linear Methods for Top-N Recommender Systems. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 11th International Conference on Data Mining(ICDM ’11). IEEE Computer Society, USA, 497–506. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICDM.2011.134
[18]
Danilo Jimenez Rezende, Shakir Mohamed, and Daan Wierstra. 2014. Stochastic backpropagation and approximate inference in deep generative models. In International conference on machine learning. PMLR, 1278–1286.
[19]
Badrul Sarwar, George Karypis, Joseph Konstan, and John Riedl. 2001. Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms. In Proceedings of the 10th international conference on World Wide Web. 285–295.
[20]
Ilya Shenbin, Anton Alekseev, Elena Tutubalina, Valentin Malykh, and Sergey I. Nikolenko. 2020. RecVAE: A New Variational Autoencoder for Top-N Recommendations with Implicit Feedback. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (Houston, TX, USA) (WSDM ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 528–536. https://doi.org/10.1145/3336191.3371831
[21]
Harald Steck. 2019. Embarrassingly shallow autoencoders for sparse data. In The World Wide Web Conference. 3251–3257.
[22]
Xiaoyuan Su and Taghi M Khoshgoftaar. 2009. A survey of collaborative filtering techniques. Advances in artificial intelligence 2009 (2009).
[23]
Jakub Tomczak and Max Welling. 2018. VAE with a VampPrior. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. PMLR, 1214–1223.
[24]
Yao Wu, Christopher DuBois, Alice X. Zheng, and Martin Ester. 2016. Collaborative Denoising Auto-Encoders for Top-N Recommender Systems. In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (San Francisco, California, USA) (WSDM ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 153–162. https://doi.org/10.1145/2835776.2835837
[25]
Xianwen Yu, Xiaoning Zhang, Yang Cao, and Min Xia. 2019. VAEGAN: A Collaborative Filtering Framework based on Adversarial Variational Autoencoders. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-19. International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization, 4206–4212. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/584

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. Stochastic-Expert Variational Autoencoder for Collaborative Filtering
          Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

          Recommendations

          Comments

          Information & Contributors

          Information

          Published In

          cover image ACM Conferences
          WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
          April 2022
          3764 pages
          ISBN:9781450390965
          DOI:10.1145/3485447
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

          Sponsors

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          Published: 25 April 2022

          Permissions

          Request permissions for this article.

          Check for updates

          Author Tags

          1. Collaborative Filtering
          2. Deep Generative Models
          3. Neural Networks
          4. Recommender Systems
          5. Variational Autoencoder
          6. Variational Inference

          Qualifiers

          • Research-article
          • Research
          • Refereed limited

          Funding Sources

          Conference

          WWW '22
          Sponsor:
          WWW '22: The ACM Web Conference 2022
          April 25 - 29, 2022
          Virtual Event, Lyon, France

          Acceptance Rates

          Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

          Contributors

          Other Metrics

          Bibliometrics & Citations

          Bibliometrics

          Article Metrics

          • Downloads (Last 12 months)55
          • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
          Reflects downloads up to 08 Mar 2025

          Other Metrics

          Citations

          Cited By

          View all
          • (2024)Variational Mixture of Stochastic Experts Auto-Encoder for Multi-Modal RecommendationIEEE Transactions on Multimedia10.1109/TMM.2024.338405826(8941-8954)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
          • (2024)Analysis of Recommender System Using Generative Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Literature ReviewIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.341696212(87742-87766)Online publication date: 2024
          • (2024)ABNSExpert Systems with Applications: An International Journal10.1016/j.eswa.2024.123868250:COnline publication date: 15-Sep-2024
          • (2023)BVAE: Behavior-aware Variational Autoencoder for Multi-Behavior Multi-Task RecommendationProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/3604915.3608781(625-636)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2023
          • (2023)ALCRKnowledge-Based Systems10.1016/j.knosys.2023.110829278:COnline publication date: 25-Oct-2023
          • (2023)A Novel Variational Autoencoder with Multi-position Latent Self-attention and Actor-Critic for RecommendationAdvanced Data Mining and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-46661-8_11(155-167)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2023

          View Options

          Login options

          View options

          PDF

          View or Download as a PDF file.

          PDF

          eReader

          View online with eReader.

          eReader

          HTML Format

          View this article in HTML Format.

          HTML Format

          Figures

          Tables

          Media

          Share

          Share

          Share this Publication link

          Share on social media