Attribute Simulation for Item Embedding Enhancement in Multi-interest Recommendation

Although multi-interest recommenders have achieved significant progress in the matching stage, our research reveals that existing models tend to exhibit an under-clustered item embedding space, which leads to a low discernibility between items and hampers item retrieval. This highlights the necessity for item embedding enhancement. However, item attributes, which serve as effective and straightforward side information for enhancement, are either unavailable or incomplete in many public datasets due to the labor-intensive nature of manual annotation tasks. This dilemma raises two meaningful questions: 1. Can we bypass manual annotation and directly simulate complete attribute information from the interaction data? And 2. If feasible, how to simulate attributes with high accuracy and low complexity in the matching stage? In this paper, we first establish an inspiring theoretical feasibility that the item-attribute correlation matrix can be approximated through elementary transformations on the item co-occurrence matrix. Then based on formula derivation, we propose a simple yet effective module, SimEmb (Item Embedding Enhancement via Simulated Attribute), in the multi-interest recommendation of the matching stage to implement our findings. By simulating attributes with the co-occurrence matrix, SimEmb discards the item ID-based embedding and employs the attribute-weighted summation for item embedding enhancement. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach notably enhances the clustering of item embedding and significantly outperforms SOTA models with an average improvement of 25.59% on Recall@20.