通过因果建模提升跨域推荐效果,避免错误信息干扰。
Causality Enhancement for Cross-Domain Recommendation
- 构建因果图指导跨域推荐,明确特征间影响关系。
- 设计无偏部分标签因果损失,提升模型泛化能力。
- 可作为通用插件部署,已在真实系统中应用。
跨域推荐是推荐系统的重要组成部分,利用源域任务或特征辅助目标域推荐。然而,不一致的源域任务可能导致建模不足或负迁移;忽略潜在因果关系则会限制特征贡献。现有方法极少直接在因果标注数据上训练跨域表示,因真实场景中获取无偏因果标签极为困难。本文提出首个尝试该方向的因果增强框架CE-CDR:首先将跨域推荐重构为因果图以提供理论指导;继而启发式构建因果感知数据集;进而推导出理论上无偏的部分标签因果损失,使模型能泛化至未见的跨域模式,生成更丰富的跨域表示,并输入目标模型以增强推荐性能。理论分析与大量实验验证了其合理性与有效性,且具备模型无关性。该方法自2025年4月起已投入生产,展现实际应用价值。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Cross-domain recommendation forms a crucial component in recommendation systems. It leverages auxiliary information through source domain tasks or features to enhance target domain recommendations. However, incorporating inconsistent source domain tasks may result in insufficient cross-domain modeling or negative transfer. While incorporating source domain features without considering the underlying causal relationships may limit their contribution to final predictions. Thus, a natural idea is to directly train a cross-domain representation on a causality-labeled dataset from the source to target domain. Yet this direction has been rarely explored, as identifying unbiased real causal labels is highly challenging in real-world scenarios. In this work, we attempt to take a first step in this direction by proposing a causality-enhanced framework, named CE-CDR. Specifically, we first reformulate the cross-domain recommendation as a causal graph for principled guidance. We then construct a causality-aware dataset heuristically. Subsequently, we derive a theoretically unbiased Partial Label Causal Loss to generalize beyond the biased causality-aware dataset to unseen cross-domain patterns, yielding an enriched cross-domain representation, which is then fed into the target model to enhance target-domain recommendations. Theoretical and empirical analyses, as well as extensive experiments, demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of CE-CDR and its general applicability as a model-agnostic plugin. Moreover, it has been deployed in production since April 2025, showing its practical value in real-world applications.
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