Group recommendation provides personalized recommendations to a group of users based on their shared interests, preferences, and characteristics. Current studies have explored different methods for integrating individual preferences and making collective decisions that benefit the group as a whole. However, most of them heavily rely on users with rich behavior and ignore latent preferences of users with relatively sparse behavior, leading to insufficient learning of individual interests. To address this challenge, we present the Multi-Granularity Attention Model (MGAM), a novel approach that utilizes multiple levels of granularity (i.e., subsets, groups, and supersets) to uncover group members' latent preferences and mitigate recommendation noise. Specially, we propose a Subset Preference Extraction module that enhances the representation of users' latent subset-level preferences by incorporating their previous interactions with items and utilizing a hierarchical mechanism. Additionally, our method introduces a Group Preference Extraction module and a Superset Preference Extraction module, which explore users' latent preferences on two levels: the group-level, which maintains users' original preferences, and the superset-level, which includes group-group exterior information. By incorporating the subset-level embedding, group-level embedding, and superset-level embedding, our proposed method effectively reduces group recommendation noise across multiple granularities and comprehensively learns individual interests. Extensive offline and online experiments have demonstrated the superiority of our method in terms of performance.

Online Food Ordering Service (OFOS) is a popular location-based service that helps people order what they want. Compared with traditional e-commerce recommendation systems, users’ interests may be diverse under different spatiotemporal contexts, leading to various spatiotemporal data distributions, which increases the difficulty of model learning. However, numerous current works simply mix all samples to train a set of model parameters, which makes it challenging to capture the diversity in different spatiotemporal contexts. Therefore, we address this challenge by proposing a Bottom-up Adaptive Spatiotemporal Model(BASM) to adaptively fit the spatiotemporal data distribution, further improving the fitting capability of the model. Specifically, a spatiotemporal-aware embedding layer performs weight adaptation on field granularity in feature embedding to achieve the purpose of dynamically perceiving spatiotemporal contexts. Meanwhile, we propose a spatiotemporal semantic transformation layer to explicitly convert the concatenated input of the raw semantic to the spatiotemporal semantic, which can further enhance the semantic representation under different spatiotemporal contexts. Furthermore, we introduce a novel spatiotemporal adaptive bias tower to capture diverse spatiotemporal bias, reducing the difficulty of modeling spatiotemporal distinction. To further verify the effectiveness of BASM, we propose two new metrics, Time-period-wise AUC (TAUC) and City-wise AUC (CAUC). Extensive offline evaluations on public and industrial datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. The online A/B experiment also further illustrates the practicability of the model online service. This proposed method has now been implemented on Ele.me, a major online food ordering platform in China, serving more than 100 million online users.

Deep Interest Network (DIN) is a state-of-the-art model which uses attention mechanism to capture user interests from historical behaviors. User interests intuitively follow a hierarchical pattern such that users generally show interests from a higher-level then to a lower-level abstraction. Modelling such interest hierarchy in an attention network can fundamentally improve the representation of user behaviors. We therefore propose an improvement over DIN to model arbitrary interest hierarchy: Deep Interest with Hierarchical Attention Network (DHAN). In this model, a multi-dimensional hierarchical structure is introduced on the first attention layer which attends to individual item, and the subsequent attention layers in the same dimension attend to higher-level hierarchy built on top of the lower corresponding layers. To enable modelling of multiple dimensional hierarchy, an expanding mechanism is introduced to capture one to many hierarchies. This design enables DHAN to attend different importance to different hierarchical abstractions thus can fully capture a user's interests at different dimensions (e.g. category, price or brand). To validate our model, a simplified DHAN is applied to Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction and our experimental results on three public datasets with two levels of one-dimensional hierarchy only by category. It shows DHAN's superiority with significant AUC uplift from 12% to 21% over DIN. DHAN is also compared with another state-of-the-art model Deep Interest Evolution Network (DIEN), which models temporal interest. The simplified DHAN also gets slight AUC uplift from 1.0% to 1.7% over DIEN. A potential future work can be combination of DHAN and DIEN to model both temporal and hierarchical interests.