Mutual Wasserstein Discrepancy Minimization for Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

Self-supervised sequential recommendation significantly improves recommendation performance by maximizing mutual information with well-designed data augmentations. However, the mutual information estimation is based on the calculation of Kullback–Leibler divergence with several limitations, including asymmetrical estimation, the exponential need of the sample size, and training instability. Also, existing data augmentations are mostly stochastic and can potentially break sequential correlations with random modifications. These two issues motivate us to investigate an alternative robust mutual information measurement capable of modeling uncertainty and alleviating KL divergence’s limitations.

Topics & Concepts