Dual Enhanced Meta-Learning With Adaptive Task Scheduler for Cold-Start Recommendation

Recommendation systems typically rely on users’ historical behavior to infer their preferences. However, when new entries emerge, the system cannot make accurate prediction due to the lack of historical data. This is known as the “cold-start” problem, which not only limits the exposure of new items but also impacts the first experience of new users severely. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to address this issue, but existing methods have limitations in dealing with the differences in user preferences and sparse monitoring data. To overcome these limitations, Dual enhanced Meta-learning with Adaptive Task Sampling is proposed. First, we propose an embedding enhancement strategy for cold nodes. Specifically, we map the cold-start embeddings into the warm space based on the common features shared across all nodes, and then add uniform noise to create the contrastive views. This strategy injects warm co-occurrence signals into the content of cold nodes, effectively enriching the feature space of cold nodes. Second, we introduce an adaptive task scheduler to measure the effectiveness of different meta-tasks and filter out the noise from invalid tasks. We assign different sampling probabilities to the tasks based on the learning process (gradient similarity) and the learning result (loss) of the meta-tasks. Finally, we consider the above two modules as auxiliary tasks for the main meta-model. Then, joint optimization is carried out through a multi-task learning framework. Experiments in three cold-start scenarios show that our approach outperforms the most advanced baselines, including traditional methods, HIN-based methods, and meta-learning-based methods.