arXiv:2509.17265cs.IR2025-09中稿 · publication at WWW…被引 2

发现高活跃小众用户能显著改善推荐,提出新方法同时考虑用户活跃度和偏好。

Identifying and Upweighting Power-Niche Users to Mitigate Popularity Bias in Recommendations

  • 按活跃度与偏好分用户,发现高活跃小众用户数量远超预期。
  • 这类用户数据对提升小众和主流用户推荐效果均有效。
  • 新框架PAIR可同时优化性能与公平性,不牺牲表现。

推荐系统存在热门物品过度推荐、小众物品被忽视的流行度偏差。本文研究基准数据集中的小众偏好用户,发现相较于主流用户,偏好小众物品的高活跃用户具有更长尾的活跃度分布。通过将用户按活跃度(高/低)和物品流行度偏好(主流/小众)划分,发现在三个基准数据集中,高活跃且偏好小众的用户数量显著高于预期。此外,这些高活跃小众用户的交互数据对提升小众及主流用户的推荐效果尤为关键。现有方法多简单加权小众用户,忽略其活跃度。为此,本文提出PAIR框架,基于贝叶斯个性化排序损失,同时依据用户活跃度与物品流行度进行重加权,最大幅度提升高活跃小众用户权重。该框架在深度与浅层协同过滤模型上均验证有效,显著降低流行度偏差,同时提升整体性能。结果表明,兼顾活跃度与偏好可实现性能与公平性的帕累托改进。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Recommender systems have been shown to exhibit popularity bias by over-recommending popular items and under-recommending relevant niche items. We seek to understand niche users in benchmark recommendation datasets as a step toward mitigating popularity bias. We find that, compared to mainstream users, niche-preferring users exhibit a longer-tailed activity-level distribution, indicating the existence of users who both prefer niche items and exhibit high activity levels on platforms. We partition users along two axes: (1) activity level ("power" vs. "light") and (2) item-popularity preference ("mainstream" vs. "niche"), and show that in three benchmark datasets, the number of power-niche users (high activity and niche preference) is statistically significantly larger than expected. We also find that interaction data from power-niche users is especially valuable for improving recommendations for not only niche but also mainstream users. In contrast, many existing popularity bias mitigation methods have focused on upweighting niche users regardless of activity level. Motivated by the value of power-niche user data, we propose PAIR (Popularity-and-Activity-Informed Reweighting), a framework for reweighting the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) loss that simultaneously reweights based on user activity level and item popularity, upweighting power-niche users the most. We instantiate the framework on both deep and shallow collaborative filtering models, and experiments on benchmark datasets show that PAIR reduces popularity bias and can increase overall performance. Although existing popularity-bias mitigation methods yield a trade-off between performance and bias, our results suggest that considering both user activity level and popularity preference leads to Pareto-dominant performance.

推荐系统流行度偏差用户分群公平性

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。