发现推荐系统偏爱热门内容的根源,并提出几何修正方法提升个性化推荐
Rethinking Popularity Bias in Collaborative Filtering via Analytical Vector Decomposition
- 通过数学分析揭示流行度偏差是协同过滤优化中的几何本质问题
- 提出DDC框架,使推荐模型在训练中自动分离偏好与流行度信号
- 在多个主流模型上验证有效,显著降低偏差且提升推荐公平性
流行度偏差从根本上削弱了协同过滤(CF)模型的个性化能力,导致其过度推荐热门项目而忽略用户对冷门内容的真实偏好。现有方法将此视为外部干扰因素,但我们通过严谨的数学分析发现,流行度偏差是贝叶斯成对排序(BPR)优化中固有的几何现象:BPR会系统性地将物品嵌入沿主导的“流行度方向”排列,嵌入向量大小直接与交互频率相关。这种几何畸变迫使用户嵌入同时承担表达真实偏好和校准全局流行度的矛盾任务,陷入次优配置,无论个体口味如何都倾向于热门项目。为此,我们提出定向分解与修正(DDC)框架,通过非对称方向更新,精准矫正嵌入空间结构:引导正样本沿个性化偏好方向,将负样本远离全局流行度方向,从几何源头解耦偏好与流行度。大量实验表明,基于多个BPR架构的DDC显著优于当前最优去偏方法,训练损失降至基线的5%以下,同时实现更优的推荐质量与公平性。代码已开源:https://github.com/LingFeng-Liu-AI/DDC。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Popularity bias fundamentally undermines the personalization capabilities of collaborative filtering (CF) models, causing them to disproportionately recommend popular items while neglecting users' genuine preferences for niche content. While existing approaches treat this as an external confounding factor, we reveal that popularity bias is an intrinsic geometric artifact of Bayesian Pairwise Ranking (BPR) optimization in CF models. Through rigorous mathematical analysis, we prove that BPR systematically organizes item embeddings along a dominant "popularity direction" where embedding magnitudes directly correlate with interaction frequency. This geometric distortion forces user embeddings to simultaneously handle two conflicting tasks-expressing genuine preference and calibrating against global popularity-trapping them in suboptimal configurations that favor popular items regardless of individual tastes. We propose Directional Decomposition and Correction (DDC), a universally applicable framework that surgically corrects this embedding geometry through asymmetric directional updates. DDC guides positive interactions along personalized preference directions while steering negative interactions away from the global popularity direction, disentangling preference from popularity at the geometric source. Extensive experiments across multiple BPR-based architectures demonstrate that DDC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art debiasing methods, reducing training loss to less than 5% of heavily-tuned baselines while achieving superior recommendation quality and fairness. Code is available in https://github.com/LingFeng-Liu-AI/DDC.
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