Not All Memories Created Equal: Dynamic User Representations for Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering methods for recommender systems tend to represent users as a single static latent vector. However, user behavior and interests may dynamically change in the context of the recommended item being presented to the user. For example, in the case of movie recommendations, it is usually true that movies that the user watched more recently are more informative than movies that were watched a long time ago. However, it is possible that a particular movie from the past may become suddenly more relevant for prediction in the presence of a recommendation for its sequel movie. In response to this issue, we introduce the Attentive Item2Vec++ (AI2V++) model, a neural attentive collaborative filtering approach in which the user representation adapts dynamically in the presence of the recommended item. AI2V++ employs a novel context-target attention mechanism in order to learn and capture different characteristics of the user’s historical behavior with respect to a potential recommended item. Furthermore, analysis of the neural-attentive scores allows for improved interpretability and explainability of the model. We evaluate our proposed approach on five publicly available datasets and demonstrate its superior performance in comparison to state-of-the-art baselines across multiple accuracy metrics.