HCFRec: Hash Collaborative Filtering via Normalized Flow with Structural Consensus for Efficient Recommendation

HCFRec: Hash Collaborative Filtering via Normalized Flow with Structural Consensus for Efficient Recommendation

Fan Wang, Weiming Liu, Chaochao Chen, Mengying Zhu, Xiaolin Zheng

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2270-2276. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/315

The ever-increasing data scale of user-item interactions makes it challenging for an effective and efficient recommender system. Recently, hash-based collaborative filtering (Hash-CF) approaches employ efficient Hamming distance of learned binary representations of users and items to accelerate recommendations. However, Hash-CF often faces two challenging problems, i.e., optimization on discrete representations and preserving semantic information in learned representations. To address the above two challenges, we propose HCFRec, a novel Hash-CF approach for effective and efficient recommendations. Specifically, HCFRec not only innovatively introduces normalized flow to learn the optimal hash code by efficiently fitting a proposed approximate mixture multivariate normal distribution, a continuous but approximately discrete distribution, but also deploys a cluster consistency preserving mechanism to preserve the semantic structure in representations for more accurate recommendations. Extensive experiments conducted on six real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our HCFRec compared to the state-of-art methods in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
Keywords:
Data Mining: Recommender Systems