In recent years, the landscape of e-learning has witnessed exceptional advancements, providing students with tools to improve their performance. In the pursuit of optimizing the e-learning experience, one emerging area of focus is the integration of recommender systems. By leveraging sophisticated algorithms, recommender systems aim to personalize the learning path by tailoring recommendations based on individual student performance, preferences, learning style and other factors.

Recently, relational metric learning methods have been received great attention in recommendation community, which is inspired by the translation mechanism in knowledge graph. Different from the knowledge graph where the entity-to-entity relations are given in advance, historical interactions lack explicit relations between users and items in recommender systems. Currently, many researchers have succeeded in constructing the implicit relations to remit this issue. However, in previous work, the learning process of the induction function only depends on a single source of data (i.e., user-item interaction) in a supervised manner, resulting in the co-occurrence relation that is free of any semantic information. In this paper, to tackle the above problem in recommender systems, we propose a joint Semantic-Enhanced Relational Metric Learning (SERML) framework that incorporates the semantic information. Specifically, the semantic signal is first extracted from the target reviews containing abundant item features and personalized user preferences. A novel regression model is then designed via leveraging the extracted semantic signal to improve the discriminative ability of original relation-based training process. On four widely-used public datasets, experimental results demonstrate that SERML produces a competitive performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods in recommender systems.

Recommender systems are widely used to suggest engaging content, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have given rise to generative recommenders. Such systems can directly generate items, including for open-set tasks like question suggestion. While the world knowledge of LLMs enable good recommendations, improving the generated content through user feedback is challenging as continuously fine-tuning LLMs is prohibitively expensive. We present a training-free approach for optimizing generative recommenders by connecting user feedback loops to LLM-based optimizers. We propose a generative explore-exploit method that can not only exploit generated items with known high engagement, but also actively explore and discover hidden population preferences to improve recommendation quality. We evaluate our approach on question generation in two domains (e-commerce and general knowledge), and model user feedback with Click Through Rate (CTR). Experiments show our LLM-based explore-exploit approach can iteratively improve recommendations, and consistently increase CTR. Ablation analysis shows that generative exploration is key to learning user preferences, avoiding the pitfalls of greedy exploit-only approaches. A human evaluation strongly supports our quantitative findings.

Ranking algorithms are fundamental to various online platforms across e-commerce sites to content streaming services. Our research addresses the challenge of adaptively ranking items from a candidate pool for heterogeneous users, a key component in personalizing user experience. We develop a user response model that considers diverse user preferences and the varying effects of item positions, aiming to optimize overall user satisfaction with the ranked list. We frame this problem within a contextual bandits framework, with each ranked list as an action. Our approach incorporates an upper confidence bound to adjust predicted user satisfaction scores and selects the ranking action that maximizes these adjusted scores, efficiently solved via maximum weight imperfect matching. We demonstrate that our algorithm achieves a cumulative regret bound of $O(d\sqrt{NKT})$ for ranking $K$ out of $N$ items in a $d$-dimensional context space over $T$ rounds, under the assumption that user responses follow a generalized linear model. This regret alleviates dependence on the ambient action space, whose cardinality grows exponentially with $N$ and $K$ (thus rendering direct application of existing adaptive learning algorithms -- such as UCB or Thompson sampling -- infeasible). Experiments conducted on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate our algorithm outperforms the baseline.

Federated recommender systems have been crucially enhanced through data sharing and continuous model updates, attributed to the pervasive connectivity and distributed computing capabilities of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Given the sensitivity of IoT data, transparent data processing in data sharing and model updates is paramount. However, existing methods fall short in tracing the flow of shared data and the evolution of model updates. Consequently, data sharing is vulnerable to exploitation by malicious entities, raising significant data privacy concerns, while excluding data sharing will result in sub-optimal recommendations. To mitigate these concerns, we present LIBERATE, a privacy-traceable federated recommender system. We design a blockchain-based traceability mechanism, ensuring data privacy during data sharing and model updates. We further enhance privacy protection by incorporating local differential privacy in user-server communication. Extensive evaluations with the real-world dataset corroborate LIBERATE's capabilities in ensuring data privacy during data sharing and model update while maintaining efficiency and performance. Results underscore blockchain-based traceability mechanism as a promising solution for privacy-preserving in federated recommender systems.

Methods for learning latent user representations from historical behavior logs have gained traction for recommendation tasks in e-commerce, content streaming, and other settings. However, this area still remains relatively underexplored in video and mobile gaming contexts. In this work, we present a novel method for overcoming this limitation by extending a long-range Transformer model from the natural language processing domain to player behavior data. We discuss specifics of behavior tracking in games and propose preprocessing and tokenization approaches by viewing in-game events in an analogous way to words in sentences, thus enabling learning player representations in a self-supervised manner in the absence of ground-truth annotations. We experimentally demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in fitting the distribution of behavior events by evaluating intrinsic language modeling metrics. Furthermore, we qualitatively analyze the emerging structure of the learned embedding space and show its value for generating insights into behavior patterns to inform downstream applications.

Called "Tokyo Futari Story," the city hall's new initiative is just that: An effort to create couples, "futari," in a country where it is increasingly common to be "hitori," or alone. While a site offering counsel and general information for potential lovebirds is online, a dating app is also in development. City hall hopes to offer it later this year, accessible through phone or web, a city official said Thursday. City Hall declined to comment on Japanese media reports that said the app will require a confirmation of identity, such as a driver's license, your tax records to prove income and a signed form that says you are ready to get married. 'MEET HOT, SINGLE FIREMEN, SCORE A PRIZE': NEWEST WAY WOMEN ARE FINDING THEIR LOVE MATCHES Marriage is on the decline in Japan as the country's birth rate fell to an all-time low, according to health ministry data on Wednesday.

Next-item recommender systems are often trained using only positive feedback with randomly-sampled negative feedback. We show the benefits of using real negative feedback both as inputs into the user sequence and also as negative targets for training a next-song recommender system for internet radio. In particular, using explicit negative samples during training helps reduce training time by ~60% while also improving test accuracy by ~6%; adding user skips as additional inputs also can considerably increase user coverage alongside slightly improving accuracy. We test the impact of using a large number of random negative samples to capture a 'harder' one and find that the test accuracy increases with more randomly-sampled negatives, but only to a point. Too many random negatives leads to false negatives that limits the lift, which is still lower than if using true negative feedback. We also find that the test accuracy is fairly robust with respect to the proportion of different feedback types, and compare the learned embeddings for different feedback types.

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, transformer-based models have gained significant attention in the context of Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs), demonstrating remarkable proficiency in capturing user-item interactions. However, such attention-based frameworks result in substantial computational overhead and extended inference time. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel efficient sequential recommendation framework GLINT-RU that leverages dense selective Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) module to accelerate the inference speed, which is a pioneering work to further exploit the potential of efficient GRU modules in SRSs. The GRU module lies at the heart of GLINT-RU, playing a crucial role in substantially reducing both inference time and GPU memory usage. Through the integration of a dense selective gate, our framework adeptly captures both long-term and short-term item dependencies, enabling the adaptive generation of item scores. GLINT-RU further integrates a mixing block, enriching it with global user-item interaction information to bolster recommendation quality. Moreover, we design a gated Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) for our framework where the information is deeply filtered. Extensive experiments on three datasets are conducted to highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of GLINT-RU. Our GLINT-RU achieves exceptional inference speed and prediction accuracy, outperforming existing baselines based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Transformer, MLP and State Space Model (SSM). These results establish a new standard in sequential recommendation, highlighting the potential of GLINT-RU as a renewing approach in the realm of recommender systems.

Recommendation systems play a pivotal role in suggesting items to users based on their preferences. However, in online platforms, these systems inevitably offer unsuitable recommendations due to limited model capacity, poor data quality, or evolving user interests. Enhancing user experience necessitates efficiently rectify such unsuitable recommendation behaviors. This paper introduces a novel and significant task termed recommendation editing, which focuses on modifying known and unsuitable recommendation behaviors. Specifically, this task aims to adjust the recommendation model to eliminate known unsuitable items without accessing training data or retraining the model. We formally define the problem of recommendation editing with three primary objectives: strict rectification, collaborative rectification, and concentrated rectification. Three evaluation metrics are developed to quantitatively assess the achievement of each objective. We present a straightforward yet effective benchmark for recommendation editing using novel Editing Bayesian Personalized Ranking Loss. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we establish a comprehensive benchmark that incorporates various methods from related fields. Codebase is available at https://github.com/cycl2018/Recommendation-Editing.