A Systematic Review and Replicability Study of BERT4Rec for Sequential Recommendation
BERT4Rec is an effective model for sequential recommendation based on the Transformer architecture. In the original publication, BERT4Rec claimed superiority over other available sequential recommendation approaches (e.g. SASRec), and it is now frequently being used as a state-of-the art baseline for sequential recommendations. However, not all subsequent publications confirmed this result and proposed other models that were shown to outperform BERT4Rec in effectiveness. In this paper we systematically review all publications that compare BERT4Rec with another popular Transformer-based model, namely SASRec, and show that BERT4Rec results are not consistent within these publications. To understand the reasons behind this inconsistency, we analyse the available implementations of BERT4Rec and show that we fail to reproduce results of the original BERT4Rec publication when using their default configuration parameters. However, we are able to replicate the reported results with the original code if training for a much longer amount of time (up to 30x) compared to the default configuration. We also propose our own implementation of BERT4Rec based on the Hugging Face Transformers library, which we demonstrate replicates the originally reported results on 3 out 4 datasets, while requiring up to 95% less training time to converge. Overall, from our systematic review and detailed experiments, we conclude that BERT4Rec does indeed exhibit state-of-the-art effectiveness for sequential recommendation, but only when trained for a sufficient amount of time. Additionally, we show that our implementation can further benefit from adapting other Transformer architectures that are available in the Hugging Face Transformers library (e.g. using disentangled attention, as provided by DeBERTa, or larger hidden layer size cf. ALBERT).
Code (1)
Tasks
Sequential RecommendationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Quantum Cognition Beyond Hilbert Space I: Fundamentals
The formalism of quantum theory in Hilbert space has been applied with success to the modeling and explanation of several cognitive phenomena, whereas traditional cognitive approaches were problematical. However, this 'q…
Automation of Citation Screening for Systematic Literature Reviews using Neural Networks: A Replicability Study
In the process of Systematic Literature Review, citation screening is estimated to be one of the most time-consuming steps. Multiple approaches to automate it using various machine learning techniques have been proposed.…
Document ClassificationSystematic Literature ReviewWord EmbeddingsA Systematic Replicability and Comparative Study of BSARec and SASRec for Sequential Recommendation
This study aims at comparing two sequential recommender systems: Self-Attention based Sequential Recommendation (SASRec), and Beyond Self-Attention based Sequential Recommendation (BSARec) in order to check the improveme…
Recommendation SystemsSequential RecommendationSearch Strategy Formulation for Systematic Reviews: issues, challenges and opportunities
Systematic literature reviews play a vital role in identifying the best available evidence for health and social care policy. The resources required to produce systematic reviews can be significant, and a key to the succ…
Paperfetcher: A tool to automate handsearch for systematic reviews
Handsearch is an important technique that contributes to thorough literature search in systematic reviews. Traditional handsearch requires reviewers to systematically browse through each issue of a curated list of field-…
ArticlesManagement