Multi-Intention Oriented Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation

What is it about?

Sequential recommendation aims to capture users’ dynamic preferences, in which data sparsity is a key problem. Most contrastive learning models leverage data augmentation to address this problem, but they amplify noises in original sequences. Contrastive learning has the assumption that two views (positive pairs) obtained from the same user behavior sequence must be similar. However, noises typically disturb the user’s main intention, which results in the dissimilarity of two views. To address this problem, in this work, we formalize the denoising problem by selecting the user’s main intention, and apply contrastive learning for the first time under this topic.

Featured Image

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We design the sequence encoder in IOCRec which includes three modules: local module, global module and disentangled module. The global module can capture users’ global preferences, which is independent of the local module. The disentangled module can obtain multi-intention behind global and local representations. From a fine-grained perspective, IOCRec separates different intentions to guide the denoising process.