Contrastive Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation

Abstract

Recommending purely cold-start items is a long-standing and fundamental challenge in the recommender systems. Without any historical interaction on cold-start items, the collaborative filtering (CF) scheme fails to leverage collaborative signals to infer user preference on these items. To solve this problem, extensive studies have been conducted to incorporate side information of items (e.g. content features) into the CF scheme. Specifically, they employ modern neural network techniques (e.g., dropout, consistency constraint) to discover and exploit the coalition effect of content features and collaborative representations. However, we argue that these works less explore the mutual dependencies between content features and collaborative representations and lack sufficient theoretical supports, thus resulting in unsatisfactory performance on cold-start recommendation.