Knowledge Transfer via Pre-training for Recommendation: A Review and Prospect

Recommender systems aim to provide item recommendations for users and are usually faced with data sparsity problems (e.g., cold start) in real-world scenarios. Recently pre-trained models have shown their effectiveness in knowledge transfer between domains and tasks, which can potentially alleviate...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zheni Zeng, Chaojun Xiao, Yuan Yao, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Fen Lin, Leyu Lin, Maosong Sun
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-03-01
Series:Frontiers in Big Data
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fdata.2021.602071/full
Description
Summary:Recommender systems aim to provide item recommendations for users and are usually faced with data sparsity problems (e.g., cold start) in real-world scenarios. Recently pre-trained models have shown their effectiveness in knowledge transfer between domains and tasks, which can potentially alleviate the data sparsity problem in recommender systems. In this survey, we first provide a review of recommender systems with pre-training. In addition, we show the benefits of pre-training to recommender systems through experiments. Finally, we discuss several promising directions for future research of recommender systems with pre-training. The source code of our experiments will be available to facilitate future research.
ISSN:2624-909X