Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to predict the subsequent behaviors of users by understanding their successive historical behaviors. Recently, some methods for SR are devoted to alleviating the data sparsity problem (i.e., limited supervised signals for training), which take account of contrastive learning to incorporate self-supervised signals into SR. Despite their achievements, it is far from enough to learn informative user/item embeddings due to the inadequacy modeling of complex collaborative information and co-action information, such as user-item relation, user-user relation, and item-item relation. In this paper, we study the problem of SR and propose a novel multi-level contrastive learning framework for sequential recommendation, named MCLSR. Different from the previous contrastive learning-based methods for SR, MCLSR learns the representations of users and items through a cross-view contrastive learning paradigm from four specific views at two different levels (i.e., interest- and feature-level). Specifically, the interest-level contrastive mechanism jointly learns the collaborative information with the sequential transition patterns, and the feature-level contrastive mechanism re-observes the relation between users and items via capturing the co-action information (i.e., co-occurrence). Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that the proposed MCLSR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods consistently.

The prosperous development of social e-commerce has spawned diverse recommendation demands, and accompanied a new recommendation paradigm, share recommendation. Significantly different from traditional binary recommendations (e.g., item recommendation and friend recommendation), share recommendation models ternary interactions among 〈 User, Item, Friend 〉 , which aims to recommend a most likely friend to a user who would like to share a specific item, progressively becoming an indispensable service in social e-commerce. Seamlessly integrating the social relations and purchase behaviours, share recommendation improves user stickiness and monetizes the user influence, meanwhile encountering three unique challenges: rich heterogeneous information, complex ternary interaction, and asymmetric share action. In this paper, we first study the share recommendation problem and propose a heterogeneous graph neural network based share recommendation model, called HGSRec. Specifically, HGSRec delicately designs a tripartite heterogeneous GNNs to describe the multifold characteristics of users and items, and then dynamically fuses them via capturing potential ternary dependency with a dual co-attention mechanism, followed by a transitive triplet representation to depict the asymmetry of share action and predict whether share action happens. Offline experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HGSRec with significant improvements (11.7%-14.5%) over the state-of-the-arts, and online A/B testing on Taobao platform further demonstrates the high industrial practicability and stability of HGSRec.

Modeling user interests is crucial in real-world recommender systems. In this paper, we present a new user interest representation model for personalized recommendation. Specifically, the key novelty behind our model is that it explicitly models user interests as a hypercuboid instead of a point in the space. In our approach, the recommendation score is learned by calculating a compositional distance between the user hypercuboid and the item. This helps to alleviate the potential geometric inflexibility of existing collaborative filtering approaches, enabling a greater extent of modeling capability. Furthermore, we present two variants of hypercuboids to enhance the capability in capturing the diversities of user interests. A neural architecture is also proposed to facilitate user hypercuboid learning by capturing the activity sequences (e.g., buy and rate) of users. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model via extensive experiments on both public and commercial datasets. Empirical results show that our approach achieves very promising results, outperforming existing state-of-the-art.

A contextual bandit problem is studied in a highly non-stationary environment, which is ubiquitous in various recommender systems due to the time-varying interests of users. Two models with disjoint and hybrid payoffs are considered to characterize the phenomenon that users' preferences towards different items vary differently over time. In the disjoint payoff model, the reward of playing an arm is determined by an arm-specific preference vector, which is piecewise-stationary with asynchronous and distinct changes across different arms. An efficient learning algorithm that is adaptive to abrupt reward changes is proposed and theoretical regret analysis is provided to show that a sublinear scaling of regret in the time length T is achieved. The algorithm is further extended to a more general setting with hybrid payoffs where the reward of playing an arm is determined by both an arm-specific preference vector and a joint coefficient vector shared by all arms. Empirical experiments are conducted on real-world datasets to verify the advantages of the proposed learning algorithms against baseline ones in both settings.

Demographics of online users such as age and gender play an important role in personalized web applications. However, it is difficult to directly obtain the demographic information of online users. Luckily, search queries can cover many online users and the search queries from users with different demographics usually have some difference in contents and writing styles. Thus, search queries can provide useful clues for demographic prediction. In this paper, we study predicting users' demographics based on their search queries, and propose a neural approach for this task. Since search queries can be very noisy and many of them are not useful, instead of combining all queries together for user representation, in our approach we propose a hierarchical user representation with attention (HURA) model to learn informative user representations from their search queries. Our HURA model first learns representations for search queries from words using a word encoder, which consists of a CNN network and a word-level attention network to select important words. Then we learn representations of users based on the representations of their search queries using a query encoder, which contains a CNN network to capture the local contexts of search queries and a query-level attention network to select informative search queries for demographic prediction. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate that our approach can effectively improve the performance of search query based age and gender prediction and consistently outperform many baseline methods.