Personalized algorithms can inadvertently expose users to discomforting recommendations, potentially triggering negative consequences. The subjectivity of discomfort and the black-box nature of these algorithms make it challenging to effectively identify and filter such content. To address this, we first conducted a formative study to understand users' practices and expectations regarding discomforting recommendation filtering. Then, we designed a Large Language Model (LLM)-based tool named DiscomfortFilter, which constructs an editable preference profile for a user and helps the user express filtering needs through conversation to mask discomforting preferences within the profile. Based on the edited profile, DiscomfortFilter facilitates the discomforting recommendations filtering in a plug-and-play manner, maintaining flexibility and transparency. The constructed preference profile improves LLM reasoning and simplifies user alignment, enabling a 3.8B open-source LLM to rival top commercial models in an offline proxy task. A one-week user study with 24 participants demonstrated the effectiveness of DiscomfortFilter, while also highlighting its potential impact on platform recommendation outcomes. We conclude by discussing the ongoing challenges, highlighting its relevance to broader research, assessing stakeholder impact, and outlining future research directions.

Dynamic graphs arise in various real-world applications, and it is often welcomed to model the dynamics in continuous time domain for its flexibility. This paper aims to design an easy-to-use pipeline (EasyDGL which is also due to its implementation by DGL toolkit) composed of three modules with both strong fitting ability and interpretability, namely encoding, training and interpreting: i) a temporal point process (TPP) modulated attention architecture to endow the continuous-time resolution with the coupled spatiotemporal dynamics of the graph with edge-addition events; ii) a principled loss composed of task-agnostic TPP posterior maximization based on observed events, and a task-aware loss with a masking strategy over dynamic graph, where the tasks include dynamic link prediction, dynamic node classification and node traffic forecasting; iii) interpretation of the outputs (e.g., representations and predictions) with scalable perturbation-based quantitative analysis in the graph Fourier domain, which could comprehensively reflect the behavior of the learned model. Empirical results on public benchmarks show our superior performance for time-conditioned predictive tasks, and in particular EasyDGL can effectively quantify the predictive power of frequency content that a model learns from evolving graph data.

Spectral methods for graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success. Despite their success, many works have shown that existing approaches are mainly focused on low-frequency information which may not be pertinent to the task at hand. Recent efforts have been made to design new graph filters for wider frequency profiles, but it remains an open problem how to learn multi-scale disentangled node embeddings in the graph Fourier domain. In this paper, we propose a graph (signal) sampling and filtering framework, entitled Pyramid Graph Neural Network (PyGNN), which follows the Downsampling-Filtering-Upsampling-Decoding scheme. To be specific, we develop an ω-bandlimited downsampling approach to split input graph into subgraphs for the reduction of high-frequency components, then perform spectral graph filters on subgraphs to achieve node embeddings with different frequency bands, and propose a Laplacian smoothing-based upsampling approach to extrapolate the node embedding on subgraphs to the full set of vertices on the original graph. In the end, we add frequency-aware gated units to decode node embeddings of different frequencies for downstream tasks. Results on both homophilic and heterophilic graph datasets show its superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

Capturing the dynamics in user preference is crucial to better predict user future behaviors because user preferences often drift over time. Many existing recommendation algorithms – including both shallow and deep ones – often model such dynamics independently, i.e., user static and dynamic preferences are not modeled under the same latent space, which makes it difficult to fuse them for recommendation. This paper considers the problem of embedding a user's sequential behavior into the latent space of user preferences, namelytranslating sequence to preference. To this end, we formulate the sequential recommendation task as a dictionary learning problem, which learns: 1) a shareddictionary matrix, each row of which represents a partial signal of user dynamic preferences shared across users; and 2) aposterior distribution estimatorusing a deep autoregressive model integrated with Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), which can select related rows of the dictionary to represent a user's dynamic preferences conditioned on his/her past behaviors. Qualitative studies on the Netflix dataset demonstrate that the proposed method can capture the user preference drifts over time and quantitative studies on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve higher accuracy compared with state-of-the-art factorization and neural sequential recommendation methods.

One-bit matrix completion is an important class of positive-unlabeled (PU) learning problems where the observations consist of only positive examples, e.g., in top-N recommender systems. For the first time, we show that 1-bit matrix completion can be formulated as the problem of recovering clean graph signals from noise-corrupted signals in hypergraphs. This makes it possible to enjoy recent advances in graph signal learning. Then, we propose the spectral graph matrix completion (SGMC) method, which can recover the underlying matrix in distributed systems by filtering the noisy data in the graph frequency domain. Meanwhile, it can provide micro- and macro-level explanations by following vertex-frequency analysis. To tackle the computational and memory issue of performing graph signal operations on large graphs, we construct a scalable Nystrom algorithm which can efficiently compute orthonormal eigenvectors. Furthermore, we also develop polynomial and sparse frequency filters to remedy the accuracy loss caused by the approximations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms on top-N recommendation tasks, and the results on three large-scale real-world datasets show that SGMC can outperform state-of-the-art top-N recommendation algorithms in accuracy while only requiring a small fraction of training time compared to the baselines.

User interests are usually dynamic in the real world, which poses both theoretical and practical challenges for learning accurate preferences from rich behavior data. Among existing user behavior modeling solutions, attention networks are widely adopted for its effectiveness and relative simplicity. Despite being extensively studied, existing attentions still suffer from two limitations: i) conventional attentions mainly take into account the spatial correlation between user behaviors, regardless the distance between those behaviors in the continuous time space; and ii) these attentions mostly provide a dense and undistinguished distribution over all past behaviors then attentively encode them into the output latent representations. This is however not suitable in practical scenarios where a user’s future actions are relevant to a small subset of her/his historical behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel attention network, named \textit{self-modulating attention}, that models the complex and non-linearly evolving dynamic user preferences. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on top-N sequential recommendation tasks, and the results on three large-scale real-world datasets show that our model can achieve state-of-the-art performance.

In collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms, the optimal models are usually learned by globally minimizing the empirical risks averaged over all the observed data. However, the global models are often obtained via a performance tradeoff among users/items, i.e., not all users/items are perfectly fitted by the global models due to the hard non-convex optimization problems in CF algorithms. Ensemble learning can address this issue by learning multiple diverse models but usually suffer from efficiency issue on large datasets or complex algorithms. In this article, we keep the intermediate models obtained during global model learning as the snapshot models, and then adaptively combine the snapshot models for individual user-item pairs using a memory network-based method. Empirical studies on three real-world datasets show that the proposed method can extensively and significantly improve the accuracy (up to 15.9% relatively) when applied to a variety of existing collaborative filtering methods.

Matrix approximation (MA) methods are integral parts of today's recommender systems. In standard MA methods, only one feature vector is learned for each user/item, which may not be accurate enough to characterize the diverse interests of users/items. For instance, users could have different opinions on a given item, so that they may need different feature vectors for the item to represent their unique interests. To this end, this article proposes a mixture matrix approximation (MMA) method, in which we assume that the user-item ratings follow mixture distributions and the user/item feature vectors vary among different stars to better characterize the diverse interests of users/items. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method can tackle both rating prediction and the top-N recommendation problems. Empirical studies on MovieLens, Netflix and Amazon datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can outperform state-of-the-art MA-based collaborative filtering methods in both rating prediction and top-N recommendation tasks.

Ensemble matrix approximation (MA) methods have achieved promising performance in collaborative filtering, many of which perform matrix approximation on multiple submatrices of user-item ratings in parallel and then combine the predictions from the sub-models for higher efficiency. However, data partitioning could lead to suboptimal accuracy due to the lack of capturing structural information related to most or all users/items. This paper proposes a new ensemble learning framework, in which the local models and global models are synergetically updated from each other. This makes it possible to capture both local associations in user-item subgroups and global structures over all users and items. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms six state-of-the-art methods in recommendation accuracy with decent scalability.

User ratings on items are noisy in real-world recommender systems, which raises challenges to matrix approximation (MA)-based collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms — the learned models will be easily biased to the noisy training data and yield low generalization performance. This paper proposes a noise-resilient matrix approximation (NORMA) method, which can achieve less biased matrix approximation and thus more accurate collaborative filtering. In NORMA, an adaptive weighting strategy is proposed to decrease the gradient updates of noisy ratings, so that the learned MA models will be less prone to the noisy ratings. Theoretical analyses show that NORMA can achieve better generalization performance than standard matrix approximation methods. Experimental studies on real-world datasets demonstrate that NORMA can outperform state-of-the-art matrix approximation-based collaborative filtering methods in recommendation accuracy.

Gradient-based learning methods such as stochastic gradient descent are widely used in matrix approximation-based collaborative filtering algorithms to train recommendation models based on observed user-item ratings. One major difficulty in existing gradient-based learning methods is determining proper learning rates, since model convergence would be inaccurate or very slow if the learning rate is too large or too small, respectively. This paper proposes AdaError, an adaptive learning rate method for matrix approximation-based collaborative filtering. AdaError eliminates the need of manually tuning the learning rates by adaptively adjusting the learning rates based on the noisiness level of user-item ratings, using smaller learning rates for noisy ratings so as to reduce their impact on the learned models. Our theoretical and empirical analysis shows that AdaError can improve the generalization performance of the learned models. Experimental studies on the MovieLens and Netflix datasets also demonstrate that AdaError outperforms state-of-the-art adaptive learning rate methods in matrix approximation-based collaborative filtering. Furthermore, by applying AdaError to the standard matrix approximation method, we can achieve statistically significant improvements over state-of-the-art collaborative filtering methods in both rating prediction accuracy and top-N recommendation accuracy.

Recommender systems have achieved great success in recent years, and matrix approximation (MA) is one of the most popular techniques for collaborative filtering (CF) based recommendation. However, a major issue is that MA methods perform poorly at detecting strong localized associations among closely related users and items. Recently, some MA-based CF methods adopt clustering methods to discover meaningful user-item subgroups and perform ensemble on different clusterings to improve the recommendation accuracy. However, ensemble learning suffers from lower efficiency due to the increased overall computation overhead. In this paper, we propose GLOMA, a new clustering-based matrix approximation method, which can embed global information in local matrix approximation models to improve recommendation accuracy. In GLOMA, a MA model is first trained on the entire data to capture global information. The global MA model is then utilized to guide the training of cluster-based local MA models, such that the local models can detect strong localized associations shared within clusters and at the same time preserve global associations shared among all users/items. Evaluation results using MovieLens and Netflix datasets demonstrate that, by integrating global information in local models, GLOMA can outperform five state-of-the-art MA-based CF methods in recommendation accuracy while achieving descent efficiency.

Matrix approximation (MA) is one of the most popular techniques in today's recommender systems. In most MA-based recommender systems, the problem of risk minimization should be defined, and how to achieve minimum expected risk in model learning is one of the most critical problems to recommendation accuracy. This paper addresses the expected risk minimization problem, in which expected risk can be bounded by the sum of optimization error and generalization error. Based on the uniform stability theory, we propose an expected risk minimized matrix approximation method (ERMMA), which is designed to achieve better tradeoff between optimization error and generalization error in order to reduce the expected risk of the learned MA models. Theoretical analysis shows that ERMMA can achieve lower expected risk bound than existing MA methods. Experimental results on the MovieLens and Netflix datasets demonstrate that ERMMA outperforms six state-of-the-art MA-based recommendation methods in both rating prediction problem and item ranking problem.

Low-rank matrix approximation (LRMA) methods have achieved excellent accuracy among today's collaborative filtering (CF) methods. In existing LRMA methods, the rank of user/item feature matrices is typically fixed, i.e., the same rank is adopted to describe all users/items. However, our studies show that submatrices with different ranks could coexist in the same user-item rating matrix, so that approximations with fixed ranks cannot perfectly describe the internal structures of the rating matrix, therefore leading to inferior recommendation accuracy. In this paper, a mixture-rank matrix approximation (MRMA) method is proposed, in which user-item ratings can be characterized by a mixture of LRMA models with different ranks. Meanwhile, a learning algorithm capitalizing on iterated condition modes is proposed to tackle the non-convex optimization problem pertaining to MRMA. Experimental studies on MovieLens and Netflix datasets demonstrate that MRMA can outperform six state-of-the-art LRMA-based CF methods in terms of recommendation accuracy.

Low-rank matrix approximation has been widely adopted in machine learning applications with sparse data, such as recommender systems. However, the sparsity of the data, incomplete and noisy, introduces challenges to the algorithm stability – small changes in the training data may significantly change the models. As a result, existing low-rank matrix approximation solutions yield low generalization performance, exhibiting high error variance on the training dataset, and minimizing the training error may not guarantee error reduction on the testing dataset. In this paper, we investigate the algorithm stability problem of low-rank matrix approximations. We present a new algorithm design framework, which (1) introduces new optimization objectives to guide stable matrix approximation algorithm design, and (2) solves the optimization problem to obtain stable low-rank approximation solutions with good generalization performance. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed work can achieve better prediction accuracy compared with both state-of-the-art low-rank matrix approximation methods and ensemble methods in recommendation task.

Matrix approximation is one of the most effective methods for collaborative filtering-based recommender systems. However, the high computation complexity of matrix factorization on large datasets limits its scalability. Prior solutions have adopted co-clustering methods to partition a large matrix into a set of smaller submatrices, which can then be processed in parallel to improve scalability. The drawback is that the recommendation accuracy is lower as the submatrices only contain subsets of the user-item rating information. This paper presents WEMAREC, a weighted and ensemble matrix approximation method for accurate and scalable recommendation. It builds upon the intuition that (sub)matrices containing more frequent samples of certain user/item/rating tend to make more reliable rating predictions for these specific user/item/rating. WEMAREC consists of two important components: (1) a weighting strategy that is computed based on the rating distribution in each submatrix and applied to approximate a single matrix containing those submatrices; and (2) an ensemble strategy that leverages user-specific and item-specific rating distributions to combine the approximation matrices of multiple sets of co-clustering results. Evaluations using real-world datasets demonstrate that WEMAREC outperforms state-of-the-art matrix approximation methods in recommendation accuracy (0.5?11.9% on the MovieLens dataset and 2.2--13.1% on the Netflix dataset) with 3--10X improvement on scalability.