arXiv:2505.16708cs.IR2025-05

用因果约束生成模型,缓解推荐系统中的隐藏偏见。

A Novel Generative Model with Causality Constraint for Mitigating Biases in Recommender Systems

  • 引入可识别变分自编码器作为因果约束,对齐潜在表示
  • 在三个真实数据集上显著降低偏见并提升推荐准确率
  • 适合需要减少隐变量干扰的推荐系统研究与应用

准确预测反事实用户反馈是构建高效推荐系统的关键。然而,潜在混杂偏见会掩盖用户反馈与物品曝光之间的真正因果关系,最终损害推荐性能。现有因果去偏方法常依赖强假设,如工具变量(IV)可用性或潜在混杂因子与代理变量间强相关性,这些在真实场景中很少满足。为此,我们提出一种新型生成框架——用于推荐系统去偏表示学习的潜在因果约束(LCDR)。LCDR利用可识别变分自编码器(iVAE)作为因果约束,通过统一损失函数对齐标准变分自编码器(VAE)学习到的潜在表示。该对齐机制使模型能有效利用弱或噪声代理变量恢复潜在混杂因子。由此获得的表示进一步提升了推荐性能。在三个真实数据集上的大量实验表明,LCDR在缓解偏见和提高推荐准确性方面均持续优于现有方法。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Accurately predicting counterfactual user feedback is essential for building effective recommender systems. However, latent confounding bias can obscure the true causal relationship between user feedback and item exposure, ultimately degrading recommendation performance. Existing causal debiasing approaches often rely on strong assumptions-such as the availability of instrumental variables (IVs) or strong correlations between latent confounders and proxy variables-that are rarely satisfied in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel generative framework called Latent Causality Constraints for Debiasing representation learning in Recommender Systems (LCDR). Specifically, LCDR leverages an identifiable Variational Autoencoder (iVAE) as a causal constraint to align the latent representations learned by a standard Variational Autoencoder (VAE) through a unified loss function. This alignment allows the model to leverage even weak or noisy proxy variables to recover latent confounders effectively. The resulting representations are then used to improve recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that LCDR consistently outperforms existing methods in both mitigating bias and improving recommendation accuracy.

推荐系统因果推理去偏生成模型

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