Xin-Yu Lin, Yi-Yan Xu, Wen-Jie Wang, Yang Zhang, Fu-Li Feng. Mitigating Spurious Correlations for Self-supervised Recommendation. Machine Intelligence Research, vol. 20, no. 2, pp.263-275, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-022-1374-8
Citation: Xin-Yu Lin, Yi-Yan Xu, Wen-Jie Wang, Yang Zhang, Fu-Li Feng. Mitigating Spurious Correlations for Self-supervised Recommendation. Machine Intelligence Research, vol. 20, no. 2, pp.263-275, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-022-1374-8

Mitigating Spurious Correlations for Self-supervised Recommendation

doi: 10.1007/s11633-022-1374-8
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  • Author Bio:

    Xin-Yu Lin received the B. Eng. degree in artificial intelligence & robotics from School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University, China in 2021. She is currently a master student in School of Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Her research interests include causal recommendation, causal representation learning, and multimedia analysis.E-mail: xylin1028@gmail.com ORCID iD: 0000-0002-6931-3182

    Yi-Yan Xu received the B. Sc. degree in mathematics and applied mathematics from Qianweichang College, Shanghai University, China in 2022. She is currently a master student in electronic information engineering at School of Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China, China. Her research interest include recommender system, graph neural networks and causal inference.E-mail: yiyanxu24@gmail.comORCID iD: 0000-0002-5937-7289

    Wen-Jie Wang received the B. Eng. degree in computer science and engineering from School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, China in 2019. He is currently a Ph. D. degree candidate in computer science and engineering at School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore. His publications have appeared in top conferences and journals such as SIGIR, KDD, WWW, and TIP. Moreover, he has served as the PC member and reviewer for the top conferences and journals including TKDE, TOIS, SIGIR, AAAI, ACMMM, and WSDM. His research interests include causal recommendation, data mining, and multimedia. E-mail: wenjiewang96@gmail.com (Corresponding author)ORCID: 0000-0002-5199-1428

    Yang Zhang received the B. Eng. degree in electronic information engineering from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), China in 2019. He is currently a Ph. D. degree candidate in information and communication engineering at School of Information Science and Technology, USTC, China. He has two publications in the top conference SIGIR. His work on the causal recommendation has received the Best Paper Honorable Mention in SIGIR 2021. He has served as the PC member and reviewer for the top conferences and journals including TOIS, TIST, ICML-PKDD, AAAI and WSDM. His research interest include recommender system and causal inference. E-mail: zy2015@mail.ustc.edu.cn

    Fu-Li Feng received Ph. D. degree in computer science from National University of Singapore, Singapore in 2019. He is a professor in University of Science and Technology of China, China. He has over 60 publications appeared in several top conferences such as SIGIR, WWW, and SIGKDD, and journals including TKDE and TOIS. He has received the Best Paper Honourable Mention of SIGIR 2021 and Best Poster Award of WWW 2018. Moreover, he has been served as the PC member for several top conferences including SIGIR, WWW, SIGKDD, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL and invited reviewer for prestigious journals such as TOIS, TKDE, TNNLS, TPAMI. His research interests include information retrieval, data mining, causal inference and multi-media processing. E-mail: fulifeng93@gmail.com (Corresponding author)ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5828-9842

  • Received Date: 2022-06-30
  • Accepted Date: 2022-09-02
  • Publish Online: 2023-01-14
  • Publish Date: 2023-04-01
  • Recent years have witnessed the great success of self-supervised learning (SSL) in recommendation systems. However, SSL recommender models are likely to suffer from spurious correlations, leading to poor generalization. To mitigate spurious correlations, existing work usually pursues ID-based SSL recommendation or utilizes feature engineering to identify spurious features. Nevertheless, ID-based SSL approaches sacrifice the positive impact of invariant features, while feature engineering methods require high-cost human labeling. To address the problems, we aim to automatically mitigate the effect of spurious correlations. This objective requires to 1) automatically mask spurious features without supervision, and 2) block the negative effect transmission from spurious features to other features during SSL. To handle the two challenges, we propose an invariant feature learning framework, which first divides user-item interactions into multiple environments with distribution shifts and then learns a feature mask mechanism to capture invariant features across environments. Based on the mask mechanism, we can remove the spurious features for robust predictions and block the negative effect transmission via mask-guided feature augmentation. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in mitigating spurious correlations and improving the generalization abilities of SSL models.

     

  • 1 To keep notation brevity, we use ${\boldsymbol{X}}_u$ to represent both users' input features and their embeddings. It is similar for ${\boldsymbol{X}}_i$.
    2 https: //www.biendata.xyz/competition/smp2021_2/.3 http://www.recsyschallenge.com/2017/.
    3http://www.recsyschallenge.com/2017/.
    *These authors contribute equally to this work
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