Integrating Group-based Preferences from Coarse to Fine for Cold-start Users Recommendation

Siyu Wang, Jianhui Jiang, Jiangtao Qiu, Shengran Dai


Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated that cross-domain recommendation (CDR) effectively addresses the cold-start problem. Most approaches rely on transfer functions to generate user representations from the source to the target domain. Although these methods substantially enhance recommendation performance, they exhibit certain limitations, notably the frequent oversight of similarities in user preferences, which can offer critical insights for training transfer functions. Moreover, existing methods typically derive user preferences from historical purchase records or reviews, without considering that preferences operate at three distinct levels: category, brand, and aspect, each influencing decision-making differently. This paper proposes a model that integrates the preferences from coarse to fine levels to improve recommendations for cold-start users. The model leverages historical data from the source domain and external memory networks to generate user representations across different preference levels. A meta-network then transfers these representations to the target domain, where user-item ratings are predicted by aggregating the diverse representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in addressing the cold-start problem on three CDR tasks.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.153
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2236–2245
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.153/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siyu Wang, Jianhui Jiang, Jiangtao Qiu, and Shengran Dai. 2025. Integrating Group-based Preferences from Coarse to Fine for Cold-start Users Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2236–2245, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Integrating Group-based Preferences from Coarse to Fine for Cold-start Users Recommendation (Wang et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.153.pdf