Attentive Adversarial Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

Generative adversarial nets (GANs) have enjoyed considerable success in computer vision and attracted much attention from recommender systems. However, due to the discrete nature of items, it is infeasible to graft GANs directly onto recommendation models. Although several methods have taken steps forward, their training processes are slow-convergent, time-consuming, or even unstable. This article proposes a novel framework named attentive adversarial collaborative filtering (AACF) and an efficient training strategy to improve GANs in recommender systems. There are two distinct novelties over previous work. First, AACF is a differentiable generative adversarial framework that introduces an attention mechanism and “virtual items” to bridge the gap between the generator and the discriminator. Owing to the intrinsic differentiability, AACF can be stably optimized with gradient descent methods. Second, the efficient training strategy substantially reduces computational complexity. It is capable of efficiently training and scaling up the AACF model to large datasets. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, fast convergence, stability, and scalability of AACF. Since our ideas are general in nature, they will open a path to stably and efficiently train GANs in the research areas with discrete data. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/zhongchuansun/AACF.