In large-scale e-commerce live-stream recommendation, streamers are classified into different levels based on their popularity and other metrics for marketing. Several top streamers at the head level occupy a considerable amount of exposure, resulting in an unbalanced data distribution. A unified model for all levels without consideration of imbalance issue can be biased towards head streamers and neglect the conflicts between levels. The lack of inter-level streamer correlations and intra-level streamer characteristics modeling imposes obstacles to estimating the user behaviors. To tackle these challenges, we propose a curriculum multi-level learning framework for imbalanced recommendation. We separate model parameters into shared and level-specific ones to explore the generality among all levels and discrepancy for each level respectively. The level-aware gradient descent and a curriculum sampling scheduler are designed to capture the de-biased commonalities from all levels as the shared parameters. During the specific parameters training, the hardness-aware learning rate and an adaptor are proposed to dynamically balance the training process. Finally, shared and specific parameters are combined to be the final model weights and learned in a cooperative training framework. Extensive experiments on a live-stream production dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework.

User behavior sequences contain rich information about user interests and are exploited to predict user's future clicking in sequential recommendation. Existing approaches, especially recently proposed deep learning models, often embed a sequence of clicked items into a single vector, i.e., a point in vector space, which suffer from limited expressiveness for complex distributions of user interests with multi-modality and heterogeneous concentration. In this paper, we propose a new representation model, named as Seq2Bubbles, for sequential user behaviors via embedding an input sequence into a set of bubbles each of which is represented by a center vector and a radius vector in embedding space. The bubble embedding can effectively identify and accommodate multi-modal user interests and diverse concentration levels. Furthermore, we design an efficient scheme to compute distance between a target item and the bubble embedding of a user sequence to achieve next-item recommendation. We also develop a self-supervised contrastive loss based on our bubble embeddings as an effective regularization approach. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our bubble embedding can consistently outperform state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models.