In sequential recommendation scenarios, user intent is a key driver of consumption behavior. However, consumption intents are usually latent and hence, difficult to leverage for recommender systems. Additionally, intents can be of repeated nature (e.g. yearly shopping for christmas gifts or buying a new phone), which has not been exploited by previous approaches. To navigate these impediments we propose the HyperHawkes model which models user sessions via hypergraphs and extracts user intents via contrastive clustering. We use Hawkes Processes to model the temporal dynamics of intents, namely repeated consumption patterns and long-term interests of users. For short-term interest adaption, which is more fine-grained than intent-level modeling, we use a multi-level attention mixture network and fuse long-term and short-term signals. We use the generalized expectation-maximization (EM) framework for training the model by alternating between intent representation learning and optimizing parameters of the long- and short-term modules. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets from different domains show that HyperHawkes significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Session-based recommendation aims to predict the next item based on a set of anonymous sessions. Capturing user intent from a short interaction sequence imposes a variety of challenges since no user profiles are available and interaction data is naturally sparse. Recent approaches relying on graph neural networks (GNNs) for session-based recommendation use global item relations to explore collaborative information from different sessions. These methods capture the topological structure of the graph and rely on multi-hop information aggregation in GNNs to exchange information along edges. Consequently, graph-based models suffer from noisy item relations in the training data and introduce high complexity for large item catalogs. We propose to explicitly model the multi-hop information aggregation mechanism over multiple layers via shortest-path edges based on knowledge from the sequential recommendation domain. Our approach does not require multiple layers to exchange information and ignores unreliable item-item relations. Furthermore, to address inherent data sparsity, we are the first to apply supervised contrastive learning by mining data-driven positive and hard negative item samples from the training data. Extensive experiments on four different datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms almost all of the state-of-the-art methods.

Explainability in recommender systems is both crucial and challenging. Among the state-of-the-art explanation strategies, counterfactual explanation provides intuitive and easily understandable insights into model predictions by illustrating how a small change in the input can lead to a different outcome. Recently, this approach has garnered significant attention, with various studies employing different metrics to evaluate the performance of these explanation methods. In this paper, we investigate the metrics used for evaluating counterfactual explainers for recommender systems. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the performance of recommenders has a direct effect on counterfactual explainers and ignoring it results in inconsistencies in the evaluation results of explainer methods. Our findings highlight an additional challenge in evaluating counterfactual explainer methods and underscore the need to report the recommender performance or consider it in evaluation metrics.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated significant potential in recommendation tasks by effectively capturing intricate connections among users, items, and their associated features. Given the escalating demand for interpretability, current research endeavors in the domain of GNNs for Recommender Systems (RecSys) necessitate the development of explainer methodologies to elucidate the decision-making process underlying GNN-based recommendations. In this work, we aim to present our research focused on techniques to extend beyond the existing approaches for addressing interpretability in GNN-based RecSys.

Session-based recommendation aims to predict the next item based on a set of anonymous sessions. Capturing user intent from a short interaction sequence imposes a variety of challenges since no user profiles are available and interaction data is naturally sparse. Recent approaches relying on graph neural networks (GNNs) for session-based recommendation use global item relations to explore collaborative information from different sessions. These methods capture the topological structure of the graph and rely on multi-hop information aggregation in GNNs to exchange information along edges. Consequently, graph-based models suffer from noisy item relations in the training data and introduce high complexity for large item catalogs. We propose to explicitly model the multi-hop information aggregation mechanism over multiple layers via shortest-path edges based on knowledge from the sequential recommendation domain. Our approach does not require multiple layers to exchange information and ignores unreliable item-item relations. Furthermore, to address inherent data sparsity, we are the first to apply supervised contrastive learning by mining data-driven positive and hard negative item samples from the training data. Extensive experiments on three different datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms almost all of the state-of-the-art methods.