Cross-Domain Meta-Learner for Cold-Start Recommendation

Abstract

The cold-start problem is a major factor that limits the effectiveness of recommendation systems. Having too few available interaction records brings a series of challenges when predicting user preferences. At present, there are two main kinds of strategies for solving this problem from different perspectives. One is cross-domain recommendation (CDR), which introduces additional information by domain knowledge propagation with transfer learning. However, CDR methods follow traditional training processes in machine learning and cannot solve this typical few-shot problem from the perspective of optimization. The other type of methods that has recently emerged is based on meta-learning. Most of these approaches focus only on generating a meta-model to perform better on new tasks and ignore improvements based on cross-domain information. Therefore, it is necessary to design a novel approach to solve this problem with both domain knowledge and meta-optimization. To achieve this goal, a novel cross-domain meta-learner for cold-start recommendation (MetaCDR) is proposed. In MetaCDR, we design a domain knowledge meta-transfer module to connect different domain networks. In addition, we introduce a pretraining strategy to ensure its efficiency. The experimental results show that MetaCDR performs significantly better than state-of-the-art models in a variety of scenarios.