Sequential recommendation models are crucial for next-item prediction tasks in various online platforms, yet many focus on a single behavior, neglecting valuable implicit interactions. While multi-behavioral models address this using graph-based approaches, they often fail to capture sequential patterns simultaneously. Our proposed Multi-Behavioral Sequential Recommendation framework (MBSRec) captures the multi-behavior dependencies between the heterogeneous historical interactions via multi-head self-attention. Furthermore, we utilize a weighted binary cross-entropy loss for precise behavior control. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate MBSRec’s significant outperformance of state-of-the-art approaches. The implementation code is available here 1.

Click-Through Rate prediction (CTR) is a crucial task for online advertising and recommender systems. Therefore, it has gained considerable attention in the past few years as it highly affects the revenue of several commercial platforms and online systems. The primary purpose of recent research emphasizes obtaining meaningful and powerful representations through mining low and high-feature interactions using various components such as Deep Neural Networks (DNN), CrossNets, or transformer blocks. However, models utilizing one representation for the input fields in each instance restrict the model's predictive power. Other models tend to be overly complicated to reach high input data expressiveness and predictive power. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective Deep Multi-Representation model (DeepMR) that is capable of learning informative representations by jointly training a mixture of two powerful feature representation learning components, namely DNNs and multi-head self-attentions. Furthermore, DeepMR integrates the novel residual with zero initialization (ReZero) connections to the DNN and the multi-head self-attention components for learning superior input representations. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art models with a relative improvement of up to 16.6% in the task of click-through rate prediction. Our implementation code and datasets are available here https://github.com/Shereen-Elsayed/DeepMR.

In sparse recommender settings, users’ context and item attributes play a crucial role in deciding which items to recommend next. Despite that, recent works in sequential and time-aware recommendations usually either ignore both aspects or only consider one of them, limiting their predictive performance. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing a context and attribute-aware recommender model (CARCA) that can capture the dynamic nature of the user profiles in terms of contextual features and item attributes via dedicated multi-head self-attention blocks that extract profile-level features and predict item scores. Also, unlike many of the current state-of-the-art sequential item recommendation approaches that use a simple dot-product between the most recent item’s latent features and the target items embeddings for scoring, CARCA uses cross-attention between all profile items and the target items to predict their final scores. This cross-attention allows CARCA to harness the correlation between old and recent items in the user profile and their influence on deciding which item to recommend next. Experiments on four real-world recommender system datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms all state-of-the-art models in the task of item recommendation and achieving improvements of up to 53% in Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) and Hit-Ratio. Results also show that CARCA outperformed several state-of-the-art dedicated image-based recommender systems by merely utilizing image attributes extracted from a pre-trained ResNet50 in a black-box fashion.