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Over two decades, context awareness has been incorporated into recommender systems in order to provide, not only the top-rated items to consumers but also the ones that are suitable to the user context. As a class of context-aware systems, context-aware service recommendation (CASR) aims to bind high-quality services to users, while taking into account their context requirements, including invocation time, location, social profiles, connectivity, and so on. However, current CASR approaches are not scalable with the huge amount of service data (QoS and context information, users reviews and feedbacks). In addition, they lack a rich representation of contextual information, as they adopt a simple matrix view. Moreover, current CASR approaches adopt the traditional user-service relation and they do not allow for multi-relational interactions between users and services in different contexts. To offer a scalable and context-sensitive service recommendation with great analysis and learning capabilities, we provide a rich and multi-relational representation of the CASR knowledge, based on the concept of knowledge graph. The constructed context-aware service knowledge graph (C-SKG) is, then, transformed into a low-dimensional vector space to facilitate its processing. For this purpose, we adopt Dilated Recurrent Neural Networks to propose a context-aware knowledge graph embedding, based on the principles of first-order and subgraph-aware proximity. Finally, a recommendation algorithm is defined to deliver the top-rated services according to the target user's context. Experiments have proved the accuracy and scalability of our solution, compared to state-of-the-art CASR approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social recommendation has emerged to leverage social connections among users for predicting users’ unknown preferences, which could alleviate the data sparsity issue in collaborative filtering based recommendation. Early approaches relied on utilizing each user’s first-order social neighbors’ interests for better user modeling, and failed to model the social influence diffusion process from the global social network structure. Recently, we propose a preliminary work of a neural influence Diffusion Network (i.e., DiffNet) for social recommendation L. Wu, P. Sun, Y. Fu, R. Hong, X. Wang, and M. Wang, “A neural influence diffusion model for social recommendation,” in Proc. Int. ACM SIGIR Conf. Res. Develop. Inf. Retrieval, 2019, pp. 235–244.. DiffNet models the recursive social diffusion process for each user, such that the influence diffusion hidden in the higher-order social network is captured in the user embedding process. Despite the superior performance of DiffNet, we argue that, as users play a central role in both user-user social network and user-item interest network, only modeling the influence diffusion process in the social network would neglect the latent collaborative interests of users hidden in the user-item interest network. To this end, in this paper, we propose DiffNet++, an improved algorithm of DiffNet that models the neural influence diffusion and interest diffusion in a unified framework. By reformulating the social recommendation as a heterogeneous graph with social network and interest network as input, DiffNet++ advances DiffNet by injecting both the higher-order user latent interest reflected in the user-item graph and higher-order user influence reflected in the user-user graph for user embedding learning. This is achieved by iteratively aggregating each user’s embedding from three aspects: the user’s previous embedding, the influence aggregation of social neighbors from the social network, and the interest aggregation of item neighbors from the user-item interest network. Furthermore, we design a multi-level attention network that learns how to attentively aggregate user embeddings from these three aspects. Finally, extensive experimental results on four real-world datasets clearly show the effectiveness of our proposed model. We release the source code at https://github.com/PeiJieSun/diffnet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As important side information, attributes have been widely exploited in the existing recommender system for better performance. However, in the real-world scenarios, it is common that some attributes of items/users are missing (e.g., some movies miss the genre data). Prior studies usually use a default value (i.e., “other”) to represent the missing attribute, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, in this paper, we present an attribute-aware attentive graph convolution network (A ${^2}$ 2 -GCN). In particular, we first construct a graph, where users, items, and attributes are three types of nodes and their associations are edges. Thereafter, we leverage the graph convolution network to characterize the complicated interactions among $<$ < users, items, attributes $>$ > . Furthermore, to learn the node representation, we adopt the message-passing strategy to aggregate the messages passed from the other directly linked types of nodes (e.g., a user or an attribute). Towards this end, we are capable of incorporating associate attributes to strengthen the user and item representation learning, and thus naturally solve the attribute missing problem. Given that for different users, the attributes of an item have different influence on their preference to this item, we design a novel attention mechanism to filter the message passed from an item to a target user by considering the attribute information. Extensive experiments have been conducted on several publicly accessible datasets to justify our model, demonstrating that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of our attention method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the popularity of location-aware devices (e.g., smart phones), large amounts of location-based social media data such as check-ins are generated. This stimulates plenty of studies for POI recommendations by applying machine learning techniques. However, most of the existing studies focus on POI recommendations in the same city or region, and fail to recommend POIs for users when they travel to a new city. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network, named as ST-TransRec, for crossing-city POI recommendations. It integrates the deep neural network, transfer learning technique, and density-based resampling method into a unified framework. In this model, the deep neural network is used to capture users’ preferences for POIs and learn the embeddings of POIs. Besides, the transfer learning technique is employed to bridge the gap between cities that results from the city-dependent features. As the distributions over POIs are imbalanced, we design a density-based spatial resampling model which enables POIs to be well matched across cities. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets. The experimental results show the advantages of ST-TransRec over the state-of-the-art methods for crossing-city POI recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rating prediction is a classic problem underlying recommender systems. It is traditionally tackled with matrix factorization. Recently, deep learning based methods, especially graph neural networks, have made impressive progress on this problem. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods focus on modeling the user-item interaction graph. The inherent drawback of such methods is that their performance is bound to the density of the interactions, which is however usually of high sparsity. More importantly, for a strict cold start user/item that neither appears in the training data nor has any interactions in the test stage, such methods are unable to learn the preference embedding of the user/item since there is no link to this user/item in the graph. In this work, we develop a novel framework Attribute Graph Neural Networks (AGNN) by exploiting the attribute graph rather than the commonly used interaction graph. This leads to the capability of learning embeddings for the strict cold start users/items. Our AGNN can produce the preference embedding for a strict cold user/item by learning on the distribution of attributes with an extended variational auto-encoder (eVAE) structure. Moreover, we propose a new graph neural network variant, i.e., gated-GNN, to effectively aggregate various attributes of different modalities in a neighborhood. Empirical results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our model yields significant improvements for strict cold start recommendations and outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art performance in the warm start scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social recommender systems are expected to improve recommendation quality by incorporating social information when there is little user-item interaction data. However, recent reports from industry show that social recommender systems consistently fail in practice. According to the negative findings, the failure is attributed to: (1) A majority of users only have a very limited number of neighbors in social networks and can hardly benefit from social relations; (2) Social relations are noisy but they are indiscriminately used; (3) Social relations are assumed to be universally applicable to multiple scenarios while they are actually multi-faceted and show heterogeneous strengths in different scenarios. Most existing social recommendation models only consider the homophily in social networks and neglect these drawbacks. In this paper we propose a deep adversarial framework based on graph convolutional networks (GCN) to address these problems. Concretely, for (1) and (2), a GCN-based autoencoder is developed to augment the relation data by encoding high-order and complex connectivity patterns, and meanwhile is optimized subject to the constraint of reconstructing the social profile to guarantee the validity of the identified neighborhood. After obtaining enough purified social relations for each user, a GCN-based attentive social recommendation module is designed to address (3) by capturing the heterogeneous strengths of social relations. Finally, we adopt adversarial training to unify all the components by playing a Minimax game and ensure a coordinated effort to enhance recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on multiple open datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework and the ablation study confirms the importance and effectiveness of each component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social commerce, which is different from traditional e-commerce where people purchase products via initiative searching or recommendations from the platform, transforms a social community into an inclusive place to do business by enabling people to share products with their friends. A user (sharer), can share a link of a product to their social-connected friends (receiver). Once a receiver purchases the product, the sharer can earn commission provided by the platform. To promote sales, the platform can also assist sharers by providing product candidates which are more likely to be purchased during the social sharing. We define this task of generating sharing suggestions as item recommendation for word-of-mouth scenario, and to the best of our knowledge, this is a new task that has never been explored. In this article, we propose a TriM (short for Triad based word-of-Mouth recommendation) model that can capture both the sharer’s influence and the receiver’s interest at the same time, which are two significant factors that determine whether the receiver will buy the product or not. Furthermore, with joint learning on two parts of interaction data to address data sparsity issue, our proposed TriM-Joint further improves the recommendation performance. By conducting experiments, we show that our proposed models achieve the best results compared to state-of-the-art models with significant improvements by at least $7.4\% \sim 14.4\%$ 7. 4 % ∼ 14. 4 % respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data in many real-world applications such as social networks, users shopping behaviors, and inter-item relationships can be represented as graphs. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great success in learning meaningful representations for graphs by inherently integrating node information and topological structure. Data in social recommendations can also be denotes as graph data in the form of user-user social graphs and user-item graphs. In addition, the relationships between items can be denoted as item-item graphs. GNNs provide an unprecedented opportunity to advance social recommendations. However, there are tremendous challenges in building GNNs-based social recommendations where (1) users (items) are simultaneously involved in the user-item graph and user-user social graph (item-item graph); (2) user-item graphs not only contain user-item interactions but also include users’ opinions on items; and (3) the nature of social relations are heterogeneous among users. In this paper, we propose a novel graph neural network framework (GraphRec+) for social recommendations, which is able to coherently model graph data in order to learn better user and item representations. Specifically, we introduce a principled approach for jointly capturing interactions and opinions in the user-item graph and also propose an attention mechanism to differentiate the heterogeneous strengths of social relations. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender systems are popular for personalization in online communities. Users, items, and other affiliated information such as tags, item genres, and user friends of an online community form a heterogenous information network. User profiling is the foundation of personalized recommender systems. It provides the basis to discover knowledge about an individual user’s interests to items. Typically, users are profiled with their direct explicit or implicit ratings, which ignored the inter-connections among users, items, and other entity nodes of the information network. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement user profiling approach for recommender systems. The user profiling process is framed as a sequential decision making problem which can be solved with a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent. The RL agent interacts with the external heterogenous information network environment and learns a decision making policy network to decide whether there is an interest or preference path between a user and an unobserved item. To effectively train the RL agent, this paper proposes a multi-iteration training process to combine both expert and data-specific knowledge to profile users, generate meta-paths, and make recommendations. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is demonstrated in experiments conducted on three datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed a widespread increase of interest in network representation learning (NRL). By far most research efforts have focused on NRL for homogeneous networks like social networks where vertices are of the same type, or heterogeneous networks like knowledge graphs where vertices (and/or edges) are of different types. There has been relatively little research dedicated to NRL for bipartite networks. Arguably, generic network embedding methods like node2vec and LINE can also be applied to learn vertex embeddings for bipartite networks by ignoring the vertex type information. However, these methods are suboptimal in doing so, since real-world bipartite networks concern the relationship between two types of entities, which usually exhibit different properties and patterns from other types of network data. For example, E-Commerce recommender systems need to capture the collaborative filtering patterns between customers and products, and search engines need to consider the matching signals between queries and webpages. This work addresses the research gap of learning vertex representations for bipartite networks. We present a new solution BiNE, short for Bipartite Network Embedding, which accounts for two special properties of bipartite networks: long-tail distribution of vertex degrees and implicit connectivity relations between vertices of the same type. Technically speaking, we make three contributions: (1) We design a biased random walk generator to generate vertex sequences that preserve the long-tail distribution of vertices; (2) We propose a new optimization framework by simultaneously modeling the explicit relations (i.e., observed links) and implicit relations (i.e., unobserved but transitive links); (3) We explore the theoretical foundations of BiNE to shed light on how it works, proving that BiNE can be interpreted as factorizing multiple matrices. We perform extensive experiments on five real datasets covering the tasks of link prediction (classification) and recommendation (ranking), empirically verifying the effectiveness and rationality of BiNE. Our experiment codes are available at: https://github.com/clhchtcjj/BiNE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ranking on graphs is a centerpiece in many high-impact application domains, such as information retrieval, recommender systems, team management, neuroscience and many more. PageRank, along with many of its variants, is widely used across these application domains thanks to its mathematical elegance and the superior performance. Although PageRank and its variants are effective in ranking nodes on graphs, they often lack an efficient and effective way to audit the ranking results in terms of the input graph structure, e.g., which node or edge in the graph contributes most to the top-1 ranked node; which subgraph plays a crucial role in generating the overall ranking result? In this paper, we propose to audit graph ranking by finding the influential graph elements (e.g., edges, nodes, attributes, and subgraphs) regarding their impact on the ranking results. First, we formulate graph ranking auditing problem as quantifying the influence of graph elements on the ranking results. Second, we show that our formulation can be applied to a variety of graph structures. Third, we propose effective and efficient algorithms to find the top- $k$ k influential edges/nodes/subgraph. Finally, we perform extensive empirical evaluations on real-world datasets to demonstrate that the proposed methods (Aurora) provide intuitive auditing results with linear scalability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joint analysis of data from multiple information repositories facilitates uncovering the underlying structure in heterogeneous datasets. Single and coupled matrix-tensor factorization (CMTF) has been widely used in this context for imputation-based recommendation from ratings, social network, and other user-item data. When this side information is in the form of item-item correlation matrices or graphs, existing CMTF algorithms may fall short. Alleviating current limitations, we introduce a novel model coined coupled graph-tensor factorization (CGTF) that judiciously accounts for graph-related side information. The CGTF model has the potential to overcome practical challenges, such as missing slabs from the tensor and/or missing rows/columns from the correlation matrices. A novel alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is also developed that recovers the nonnegative factors of CGTF. Our algorithm enjoys closed-form updates that result in reduced computational complexity and allow for convergence claims. A novel direction is further explored by employing the interpretable factors to detect graph communities having the tensor as side information. The resulting community detection approach is successful even when some links in the graphs are missing. Results with real data sets corroborate the merits of the proposed methods relative to state-of-the-art competing factorization techniques in providing recommendations and detecting communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the booming demand of big data analytics and the constraints of computational ability and network bandwidth have made it difficult for a stand-alone agent/service provider to provide suitable information for every user from the large volume online data within the limited time. To handle this challenge, a recommender system (RS) can call in a group of agents to collaborate to learn users’ preference and taste, which is known as a distributed recommender system (DRS). DRSs can improve the accuracy of a traditional RS by requesting agents to share information with each other. However, it is challenging for DRSs to make personalized recommendations for each user due to the large amount of candidates. In addition, information sharing among agents raises a privacy concern. Thus, we propose a privacy-preserving DRS in this paper, and then model each service provider as a distributed online learner with context-awareness. Service providers collaborate to make personalized recommendations by learning users’ preferences according to the user context and users’ history behaviors. We adopt the federated learning framework to help train a high quality privacy- preserving centralized model over a large number of distributed agents which is probably unreliable with relatively slow network connections. To handle big data scenario, we build an item-cluster tree to deal with online and increasing datasets from top to the bottom. We further consider the structure of social network and present an efficient algorithm to avoid more performance loss adaptively. Theoretical proofs show that our proposed algorithm can achieve sublinear regret and differential privacy protection simultaneously for service providers and users. Numerical results confirm that our novel framework can handle increasing big datasets and strike a trade-off between privacy-preserving level and the prediction accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the proliferation of social networks, group activities have become an essential ingredient of our daily life. A growing number of users share their group activities online and invite their friends to join in. This imposes the need of an in-depth study on the group recommendation task, i.e., recommending items to a group of users. Despite its value and significance, group recommendation remains an unsolved problem due to 1) the weights of group members are crucial to the recommendation performance but are rarely learnt from data; 2) social followee information is beneficial to understand users’ preferences but is rarely considered; and 3) user-item interactions are helpful to reinforce the performance of group recommendation but are seldom investigated. Toward this end, we devise neural network-based solutions by utilizing the recent developments of attention network and neural collaborative filtering (NCF). First of all, we adopt an attention network to form the representation of a group by aggregating the group members’ embeddings, which allows the attention weights of group members to be dynamically learnt from data. Second, the social followee information is incorporated via another attention network to enhance the representation of individual user, which is helpful to capture users’ personal preferences. Third, considering that many online group systems also have abundant interactions of individual users on items, we further integrate the modeling of user-item interactions into our method. Through this way, the recommendation for groups and users can be mutually reinforced. Extensive experiments on the scope of both macro-level performance comparison and micro-level analyses justify the effectiveness and rationality of our proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event-based online social platforms, such as Meetup and Plancast, have experienced increased popularity and rapid growth in recent years. In EBSN setup, selecting suitable venues for hosting events, which can attract a great turnout, is a key challenge. In this paper, we present a deep learning based venue recommendation system $DeepVenue$ D e e p V e n u e which provides context driven venue recommendations for the Meetup event-hosts to host their events. The crux of the proposed model relies on the notion of similarity between multiple Meetup entities such as events, venues, groups, etc. We develop deep learning techniques to compute a compact descriptor for each entity, such that two entities (say, venues) can be compared numerically. Notably, to mitigate the scarcity of venue related information in Meetup, we leverage on the cross domain knowledge transfer from popular LBSN service Yelp to extract rich venue related content. For hosting an event, the proposed $DeepVenue$ D e e p V e n u e model computes a success score for each candidate venue and ranks those venues according to the scores and finally recommend the top k venues. Our rigorous evaluation on the Meetup data collected for the city of Chicago shows that $DeepVenue$ D e e p V e n u e significantly outperforms the baselines algorithms. Precisely, for 84 percent of events, the correct hosting venue appears in the top 5 of the $DeepVenue$ D e e p V e n u e recommended list. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image based social networks are among the most popular social networking services in recent years. With a tremendous amount of images uploaded everyday, understanding users’ preferences on user-generated images and making recommendations have become an urgent need. In fact, many hybrid models have been proposed to fuse various kinds of side information (e.g., image visual representation, social network) and user-item historical behavior for enhancing recommendation performance. However, due to the unique characteristics of the user generated images in social image platforms, the previous studies failed to capture the complex aspects that influence users’ preferences in a unified framework. Moreover, most of these hybrid models relied on predefined weights in combining different kinds of information, which usually resulted in sub-optimal recommendation performance. To this end, in this paper, we develop a hierarchical attention model for social contextual image recommendation. In addition to basic latent user interest modeling in the popular matrix factorization based recommendation, we identify three key aspects (i.e., upload history, social influence, and owner admiration) that affect each user's latent preferences, where each aspect summarizes a contextual factor from the complex relationships between users and images. After that, we design a hierarchical attention network that naturally mirrors the hierarchical relationship (elements in each aspects level, and the aspect level) of users’ latent interests with the identified key aspects. Specifically, by taking embeddings from state-of-the-art deep learning models that are tailored for each kind of data, the hierarchical attention network could learn to attend differently to more or less content. Finally, extensive experimental results on real-world datasets clearly show the superiority of our proposed model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event recommendation is essential to help people find attractive events to attend, but it intrinsically faces cold-start problem. The previous studies exploit multiple contextual factors to overcome the cold-start problem in event recommendation. However, they do not consider the correlation among different contextual factors. Moreover, suggesting events for a group of users also has not been well studied. In this paper, we first discover the correlation between organizer and textual content, i.e., the events held by the same organizer tend to have more similar content. Based on this observation, we present a content-venue-aware topic model (CVTM) to capture group interests on an event from two perspectives: content and venue. The correlation between organizer and content is modeled in CVTM to alleviate the sparsity of textual content, and then we can further extract group interests on content of an event more accurately. Finally, a group event recommendation method using CVTM is proposed. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the recommendation performance of our model on two real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods that suggest upcoming events for groups. Besides, CVTM can learn semantically coherent latent topics which are useful to explain recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]