arXiv subjects

Yunze Luo

Publications and source records attributed to Yunze Luo.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Denoising Implicit Feedback for Cold-start Recommendation

Implicit feedback is widely used in recommender systems due to its accessibility and generality, yet it usually presents noisy samples (e.g., clickbait, position bias). Meanwhile, recommenders inevitably face the item cold-start problem due to the continuous influx of new items. We identify that cold items are more prone to noisy samples due to the aforementioned factors, and researchers often overlook the significance of denoising implicit feedback for cold items. Previous denoising studies usually identify noisy samples based on heuristic patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigate noise through sample selection or re-weighting. However, these methods have limited adaptability and are ineffective in cold-start scenarios. To achieve denoising implicit feedback for cold-start recommendation, we propose a model-agnostic denoising method called DIF. First, user preferences for content remain stable, which allows us to infer pseudo-labels indicating whether a user is interested in a cold item through content-similar warm items. Furthermore, to improve pseudo-label accuracy, we model the confidence of pseudo-labels based on the content similarity between the cold item and warm items, and then aggregate multiple pseudo-labels for each sample. Finally, we explicitly estimate the uncertainty of the noisy sample label by considering its relative entropy and the cold-start status of the item, which adaptively guides the role of pseudo-labels to correct the noisy labels at the sample level. DIF's superiority is supported by both theoretical justification and extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The method has been deployed on a billion-user scale short video application Kuaishou and has significantly improved various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Representation Quantization for Collaborative Filtering Augmentation

As the core algorithm in recommendation systems, collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms inevitably face the problem of data sparsity. Since CF captures similar users and items for recommendations, it is effective to augment the lacking user-user and item-item homogeneous linkages. However, existing methods are typically limited to connecting through overlapping interacted neighbors or through similar attributes and contents. These approaches are constrained by coarse-grained, sparse attributes and fail to effectively extract behavioral characteristics jointly from interaction sequences and attributes. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage collaborative recommendation algorithm, DQRec: Decomposition-based Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (DQ-VAE) for Recommendation. DQRec augments features and homogeneous linkages by extracting the behavior characteristics jointly from interaction sequences and attributes, namely patterns, such as user multi-aspect interests. Inspired by vector quantization (VQ) technology, we propose a new VQ algorithm, DQ-VAE, which decomposes the pre-trained representation embeddings into distinct dimensions, and quantize them to generates semantic IDs. We utilize the generated semantic IDs as the extracted patterns mentioned above. By integrating these semantic ID patterns into the recommendation process through feature and linkage augmentation, the system enriches both latent and explicit user and item features, identifies pattern-similar neighbors, and thereby improves the efficiency of information diffusion. Experimental comparisons with baselines across multiple datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed DQRec method.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Towards Comprehensible Recommendation with Large Language Model Fine-tuning

Recommender systems have become increasingly ubiquitous in daily life. While traditional recommendation approaches primarily rely on ID-based representations or item-side content features, they often fall short in capturing the underlying semantics aligned with user preferences (e.g., recommendation reasons for items), leading to a semantic-collaborative gap. Recently emerged LLM-based feature extraction approaches also face a key challenge: how to ensure that LLMs possess recommendation-aligned reasoning capabilities and can generate accurate, personalized reasons to mitigate the semantic-collaborative gap. To address these issues, we propose a novel Content Understanding from a Collaborative Perspective framework (CURec), which generates collaborative-aligned content features for more comprehensive recommendations. CURec first adapts the LLM with recommendation objectives through post-training, equipping it with instruction-following and chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities. Next, we use the LLM-generated features to train the recommender model. Then, we treat the user-item prediction scores produced by the trained recommender model as reward signals to guide RL-based refinement of the LLM, thereby improving the quality of generated reasons and pattern. The corrected reasons are directly integrated into the recommender model to enhance comprehensibility and recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of CURec over existing methods.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Online Item Cold-Start Recommendation with Popularity-Aware Meta-Learning

With the rise of e-commerce and short videos, online recommender systems that can capture users' interests and update new items in real-time play an increasingly important role. In both online and offline recommendation systems, the cold-start problem caused by interaction sparsity has been impacting the effectiveness of recommendations for cold-start items. Many cold-start scheme based on fine-tuning or knowledge transferring shows excellent performance on offline recommendation. Yet, these schemes are infeasible for online recommendation on streaming data pipelines due to different training method, computational overhead and time constraints. Inspired by the above questions, we propose a model-agnostic recommendation algorithm called Popularity-Aware Meta-learning (PAM), to address the item cold-start problem under streaming data settings. PAM divides the incoming data into different meta-learning tasks by predefined item popularity thresholds. The model can distinguish and reweight behavior-related and content-related features in each task based on their different roles in different popularity levels, thus adapting to recommendations for cold-start samples. These task-fixing design significantly reduces additional computation and storage costs compared to offline methods. Furthermore, PAM also introduced data augmentation and an additional self-supervised loss specifically designed for low-popularity tasks, leveraging insights from high-popularity samples. This approach effectively mitigates the issue of inadequate supervision due to the scarcity of cold-start samples. Experimental results across multiple public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over other baseline methods in addressing cold-start challenges in online streaming data scenarios.

cs.IR↗