Latent side-information dynamic augmentation for incremental recommendation

The incremental recommendation involves updating existing models by extracting information from interaction data at current time-step, with the aim of maintaining model accuracy while addressing limitations including parameter dependencies and inefficient training. However, real-time user interaction data is often afflicted by substantial noise and invalid samples, presenting the following key challenges for incremental model updating: (1) how to effectively extract valuable new knowledge from interaction data at the current time-step to ensure model accuracy and timeliness, and (2) how to safeguard against the catastrophic forgetting of long-term stable preference information, thus preserving the model’s sensitivity during cold-starts. In response to these challenges, we propose the Incremental Recommendation with Stable Latent Side-information Updating (SIIFR). This model employs a side-information augmenter to extract valuable latent side-information from user interaction behavior at time-step T, thereby sidestepping the interference caused by noisy interaction data and acquiring stable user preference. Moreover, the model utilizes rough interaction data at time-step \(T+1\), in conjunction with existing side-information enhancements to achieve incremental updates of latent preferences, thereby ensuring the model’s efficacy during cold-start. Furthermore, SIIFR leverages the change rate in user latent side-information to mitigate catastrophic forgetting that results in the loss of long-term stable preference information. The effectiveness of the proposed model is validated and compared against existing models using four popular incremental datasets. The model code can be achieved at: https://github.com/LNNU-computer-research-526/FR-sii.