FLAG: A Feedback-aware Local and Global Model for Heterogeneous Sequential Recommendation

Heterogeneous sequential recommendation that models sequences of items associated with more than one type of feedback such as examinations and purchases is an emerging topic in the research community, which is also an important problem in many real-world applications. Though there are some methods proposed to exploit different types of feedback in item sequences such as RLBL, RIB, and BINN, they are based on RNN and may not be very competitive in capturing users’ complex and dynamic preferences. And most existing advanced sequential recommendation methods such as the CNN- and attention-based methods are often designed for making use of item sequences with one single type of feedback, which thus can not be applied to the studied problem directly. As a response, we propose a novel feedback-aware local and global (FLAG) preference learning model for heterogeneous sequential recommendation. Our FLAG contains four modules, including (i) a local preference learning module for capturing a user’s short-term interest, which adopts a novel feedback-aware self-attention block to distinguish different types of feedback; (ii) a global preference learning module for modeling a user’s global preference; (iii) a local intention learning module, which takes a user’s real feedback in the next step, i.e., the user’s intention at the current step, as the query vector in a self-attention block to figure out the items that match the user’s intention well; and (iv) a prediction module for preference integration and final prediction. We then conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets and find that our FLAG significantly outperforms 13 very competitive baselines in terms of two commonly used ranking-oriented metrics in most cases. We also include ablation studies and sensitivity analysis of our FLAG to have more in-depth insights.