arXiv:2503.18300cs.IR2025-03

提出RAU方法,解决推荐系统中稀疏对齐与不均均匀性问题。

RAU: Towards Regularized Alignment and Uniformity for Representation Learning in Recommendation

  • 通过中心强化对齐与低方差引导均匀性,优化表示分布
  • 在三个真实数据集上超越当前最优协同过滤方法
  • 适合追求高精度推荐的工程师与研究者

推荐系统在现代在线平台中至关重要,其核心是设计强大编码器将用户与物品映射到高维向量空间,并通过损失函数优化表示分布。近期研究表明,直接优化表示分布的关键属性(如对齐性与均匀性)可超越复杂编码器设计。然而,现有方法忽略数据稀疏性的影响:交互稀少导致对齐稀疏,交互过多引发均匀性不均,均会降低性能。本文识别出稀疏对齐与不均均匀性问题,提出正则化对齐与均匀性(RAU)方法应对。RAU包含两项新正则化策略:1)中心强化对齐,增强批次内用户/物品表示均值对齐,减少用户与物品表示差异;2)低方差引导均匀性,最小化成对距离方差,稳定训练过程中的均匀性提升。在三个真实数据集上的大量实验表明,RAU显著优于当前主流协同过滤方法,验证了两项正则化策略的有效性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recommender systems (RecSys) have become essential in modern society, driving user engagement and satisfaction across diverse online platforms. Most RecSys focuses on designing a powerful encoder to embed users and items into high-dimensional vector representation space, with loss functions optimizing their representation distributions. Recent studies reveal that directly optimizing key properties of the representation distribution, such as alignment and uniformity, can outperform complex encoder designs. However, existing methods for optimizing critical attributes overlook the impact of dataset sparsity on the model: limited user-item interactions lead to sparse alignment, while excessive interactions result in uneven uniformity, both of which degrade performance. In this paper, we identify the sparse alignment and uneven uniformity issues, and further propose Regularized Alignment and Uniformity (RAU) to cope with these two issues accordingly. RAU consists of two novel regularization methods for alignment and uniformity to learn better user/item representation. 1) Center-strengthened alignment further aligns the average in-batch user/item representation to provide an enhanced alignment signal and further minimize the disparity between user and item representation. 2) Low-variance-guided uniformity minimizes the variance of pairwise distances along with uniformity, which provides extra guidance to a more stabilized uniformity increase during training. We conducted extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, and the proposed RAU resulted in significant performance improvements compared to current state-of-the-art CF methods, which confirms the advantages of the two proposed regularization methods.

推荐系统表示学习正则化

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。