GS-RS: A Generative Approach for Alleviating Cold Start and Filter Bubbles in Recommender Systems

Recommender Systems (RSs) typically face the cold-start problem and the filter-bubble problem when users suffer the familiar, repeated, and even predictable recommendations, making them bored and unsatisfied. The key to solving these issues is learning users’ fine-grained preferences and recommending appealing and unexplored items deviating from users’ historical items. However, existing models consider cold-start or filter bubble problems separately and ignore that they can reinforce mutually and damage the models’ performance accuracy. To this end, we devise a novel serendipity-oriented recommender system (
G
enerative
S
elf-constrained
S
erendipitous
R
ecommender
S
ystem,
GS$^{2}$2-RS
) that generates users’ fine-grained preferences to enhance the recommendation performance. Specifically, GS
$^{2}$
-RS extracts users’ interest and satisfaction preferences and generates virtual but convincible neighbors’ preferences from themselves with a twin Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets (not from real neighbors). Then we introduce the serendipity item, which is low-interest but high-satisfaction among candidate items. We use the serendipity item to improve the diversity of recommended items, which relieves the filter-bubble problem. Along with this line, a gated mechanism is applied to their fine-grained preferences (interests, satisfactions) to obtain their serendipity items. Finally, these serendipity items are inversely injected into the original user-item rating matrix and build a relatively dense matrix as the input for backbone RS models. Note that GS
$^{2}$
-RS tackles cold-start and filter-bubble problems in a unified framework without any additional side information and enriches the interpretability of recommendation models. We comprehensively validate GS
$^{2}$
-RS for solving cold-start and filter bubble problems on four real-world benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments illustrate GS
$^{2}$
-RS's superiority in accuracy, serendipity, and interpretability over state-of-the-art models. Also, we can plug our model into existing recommender systems as a preprocessing procedure to enhance their performance.