Explainable Session-Based Recommendation via Path Reasoning

This paper explores explaining session-based recommendation (SR) by path reasoning. Current SR models emphasize accuracy but lack explainability, while traditional path reasoning prioritizes knowledge graph exploration, ignoring sequential patterns present in the session history. Therefore, we propose a generalized hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for SR, which improves the explainability of existing SR models via Path Reasoning, namely PR4SR. Considering the different importance of items to the session, we design the session-level agent to select the items in the session as the starting nodes for path reasoning and the path-level agent to perform path reasoning. In particular, we design a multi-target reward mechanism to adapt to the skip behaviors of sequential patterns in SR and introduce path midpoint reward to enhance the exploration efficiency and accuracy in knowledge graphs. To improve the knowledge graph’s completeness and diversify the paths of explanation, we incorporate extracted feature information from images into the knowledge graph. We instantiate PR4SR in five state-of-the-art SR models (i.e., GRU4REC, NARM, GCSAN, SR-GNN, SASRec) and compare it with other explainable SR frameworks to demonstrate the effectiveness of PR4SR for recommendation and explanation tasks through extensive experiments with these approaches on four datasets.