Publications

2024

1. ECIR

   Countering Mainstream Bias via End-to-End Adaptive Local Learning

   Jinhao Pan , Ziwei Zhu, Jianling Wang, Allen Lin, and James Caverlee

   In European Conference on Information Retrieval , 2024

   Abs arXiv Bib PDF

   Collaborative filtering (CF) based recommendations suffer from mainstream bias – where mainstream users are favored over niche users, leading to poor recommendation quality for many long-tail users. In this paper, we identify two root causes of this mainstream bias: (i) discrepancy modeling, whereby CF algorithms focus on modeling mainstream users while neglecting niche users with unique preferences; and (ii) unsynchronized learning, where niche users require more training epochs than mainstream users to reach peak performance. Targeting these causes, we propose a novel end-To-end Adaptive Local Learning (TALL) framework to provide high-quality recommendations to both mainstream and niche users. TALL uses a loss-driven Mixture-of-Experts module to adaptively ensemble experts to provide customized local models for different users. Further, it contains an adaptive weight module to synchronize the learning paces of different users by dynamically adjusting weights in the loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed model. Code and data are provided at https://github.com/JP-25/end-To-end-Adaptive-Local-Leanring-TALL-.

   @inproceedings{pan2024countering,
     title = {Countering Mainstream Bias via End-to-End Adaptive Local Learning},
     author = {Pan, Jinhao and Zhu, Ziwei and Wang, Jianling and Lin, Allen and Caverlee, James},
     booktitle = {European Conference on Information Retrieval},
     pages = {75--89},
     year = {2024},
     organization = {Springer},
     isbn = {978-3-031-56069-9},
   }