Adaptive attention-aware gated recurrent unit for sequential recommendation

Due to the dynamic and evolutionary characteristics of user interests, sequential recommendation plays a significant role in recommender systems. A fundamental problem in the sequential recommendation is modeling dynamic user preference. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are widely adopted in the sequential recommendation, especially attention-based RNN becomes the state-of-the-art solution. However the existing fixed attention mechanism is insufficient to model the dynamic and evolutionary characteristics of user sequential preferences. In this work, we propose a novel solution, Adaptive Attention-Aware Gated Recurrent Unit (3AGRU), to learn adaptive user sequential representations for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we adopt an attention mechanism to adapt the representation of user sequential preference, and learn the interaction between steps and items from data. Moreover, in the first level of 3AGRU, we construct adaptive attention network to describe the relevance between input and the candidate item. In this way, a new input based on adaptive attention can reflect users’ diverse interests. Then, the second level of 3AGRU applies adaptive attention network to hidden state level to learn a deep user representation which is able to express diverse interests of the user. Finally, we evaluate the proposed model using three real-world datasets from various application scenarios. Our experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on sequential recommendation.