Learning Robust Sequential Recommenders through Confident Soft Labels
Sequential recommenders that are trained on implicit feedback are usually learned as a multi-class classification task through softmax-based loss functions on one-hot class labels. However, one-hot training labels are sparse and may lead to biased training and sub-optimal performance. Dense, soft labels have been shown to help improve recommendation performance. But how to generate high-quality and confident soft labels from noisy sequential interactions between users and items is still an open question. We propose a new learning framework for sequential recommenders, CSRec, which introduces confident soft labels to provide robust guidance when learning from user-item interactions. CSRec contains a teacher module that generates high-quality and confident soft labels and a student module that acts as the target recommender and is trained on the combination of dense, soft labels and sparse, one-hot labels. We propose and compare three approaches to constructing the teacher module: (i) model-level, (ii) data-level, and (iii) training-level. To evaluate the effectiveness and generalization ability of CSRec, we conduct experiments using various state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models as the target student module on four benchmark datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that CSRec is effective in training better performing sequential recommenders.
Code (1)
Tasks
Multi-class ClassificationSequential RecommendationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
PixRec: Leveraging Visual Context for Next-Item Prediction in Sequential Recommendation
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown strong potential for usage in sequential recommendation tasks through text-only models, which combine advanced prompt design, contrastive alignment, and fine-tuning on dow…
Sequential RecommendationImportance Filtered Cross-Domain Adaptation
In Domain Adaptation (DA), the category-relevant losses usually occupy a dominant position, while they are usually built with hard or soft labels in existing models. We observed that hard labels are overconfident due to …
Domain AdaptationObject RecognitionAre LLM-based Recommenders Already the Best? Simple Scaled Cross-entropy Unleashes the Potential of Traditional Sequential Recommenders
Large language models (LLMs) have been garnering increasing attention in the recommendation community. Some studies have observed that LLMs, when fine-tuned by the cross-entropy (CE) loss with a full softmax, could achie…
Sequential RecommendationBlack-Box Attacks on Sequential Recommenders via Data-Free Model Extraction
We investigate whether model extraction can be used to "steal" the weights of sequential recommender systems, and the potential threats posed to victims of such attacks. This type of risk has attracted attention in image…
Data PoisoningKnowledge DistillationModel extractionRecommendation Systems+4To Copy, or not to Copy; That is a Critical Issue of the Output Softmax Layer in Neural Sequential Recommenders
Recent studies suggest that the existing neural models have difficulty handling repeated items in sequential recommendation tasks. However, our understanding of this difficulty is still limited. In this study, we substan…
Sequential Recommendation