Exploring Recommendation Capabilities of GPT-4V(ision): A Preliminary Case Study

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various vision and language tasks, yet their potential applications in recommendation tasks with visual assistance remain unexplored. To bridge this gap, we present a preliminary case study investigating the recommendation capabilities of GPT-4V(ison), a recently released LMM by OpenAI. We construct a series of qualitative test samples spanning multiple domains and employ these samples to assess the quality of GPT-4V's responses within recommendation scenarios. Evaluation results on these test samples prove that GPT-4V has remarkable zero-shot recommendation abilities across diverse domains, thanks to its robust visual-text comprehension capabilities and extensive general knowledge. However, we have also identified some limitations in using GPT-4V for recommendations, including a tendency to provide similar responses when given similar inputs. This report concludes with an in-depth discussion of the challenges and research opportunities associated with utilizing GPT-4V in recommendation scenarios. Our objective is to explore the potential of extending LMMs from vision and language tasks to recommendation tasks. We hope to inspire further research into next-generation multimodal generative recommendation models, which can enhance user experiences by offering greater diversity and interactivity. All images and prompts used in this report will be accessible at https://github.com/PALIN2018/Evaluate_GPT-4V_Rec.

Rethinking Multi-Interest Learning for Candidate Matching in Recommender Systems

Existing research efforts for multi-interest candidate matching in recommender systems mainly focus on improving model architecture or incorporating additional information, neglecting the importance of training schemes. This work revisits the training framework and uncovers two major problems hindering the expressiveness of learned multi-interest representations. First, the current training objective (i.e., uniformly sampled softmax) fails to effectively train discriminative representations in a multi-interest learning scenario due to the severe increase in easy negative samples. Second, a routing collapse problem is observed where each learned interest may collapse to express information only from a single item, resulting in information loss. To address these issues, we propose the REMI framework, consisting of an Interest-aware Hard Negative mining strategy (IHN) and a Routing Regularization (RR) method. IHN emphasizes interest-aware hard negatives by proposing an ideal sampling distribution and developing a Monte-Carlo strategy for efficient approximation. RR prevents routing collapse by introducing a novel regularization term on the item-to-interest routing matrices. These two components enhance the learned multi-interest representations from both the optimization objective and the composition information. REMI is a general framework that can be readily applied to various existing multi-interest candidate matching methods. Experiments on three real-world datasets show our method can significantly improve state-of-the-art methods with easy implementation and negligible computational overhead. The source code will be released.

Efficiently Leveraging Multi-level User Intent for Session-based Recommendation via Atten-Mixer Network

Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict the user next action based on short and dynamic sessions. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in utilizing various elaborately designed graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture the pair-wise relationships among items, seemingly suggesting the design of more complicated models is the panacea for improving the empirical performance. However, these models achieve relatively marginal improvements with exponential growth in model complexity. In this paper, we dissect the classical GNN-based SBR models and empirically find that some sophisticated GNN propagations are redundant, given the readout module plays a significant role in GNN-based models. Based on this observation, we intuitively propose to remove the GNN propagation part, while the readout module will take on more responsibility in the model reasoning process. To this end, we propose the Multi-Level Attention Mixture Network (Atten-Mixer), which leverages both concept-view and instance-view readouts to achieve multi-level reasoning over item transitions. As simply enumerating all possible high-level concepts is infeasible for large real-world recommender systems, we further incorporate SBR-related inductive biases, i.e., local invariance and inherent priority to prune the search space. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposal.