Live Session
Session 7: Cold Start
Main Track
Prompt Tuning for Item Cold-start Recommendation
Yuezihan Jiang (Kuaishou Technology), Gaode Chen (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China), Wenhan Zhang (Peking University), Jingchi Wang (Peking University), Yinjie Jiang (Kuaishou Technology), Qi Zhang (Kuaishou Technology), Jingjian Lin (Kuaishou Technology), Peng Jiang (Kuaishou Technology) and Kaigui Bian (Peking University)
Abstract
The item cold-start problem is crucial for online recommender systems, as the success of the cold-start phase determines whether items can transition into popular ones. Prompt learning, a powerful technique used in natural language processing (NLP) to address zero- or few-shot problems, has been adapted for recommender systems to tackle similar challenges. However, existing methods typically rely on content-based properties or text descriptions for prompting, which we argue may be suboptimal for cold-start recommendations due to 1) semantic gaps with recommender tasks, 2) model bias caused by warm-up items contribute most of positive feedback to the model, which is the core of the cold-start problem that hinder the recommender quality on cold-start items. We propose to leverage high-value positive feedback, termed pinnacle feedback as prompt information, to simultaneously resolve the above two problems. We experimentally prove that comparing to content description proposed in existing works, the positive feedback is more suitable to serve as prompt information by bridging the semantic gaps. Besides, we propose item-wise personalized prompt networks to encode pinnaclce feedback to relieve the model bias by the positive feedback dominance problem. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, PROMO has been successfully deployed on a popular short-video sharing platform, a billion-user scale commercial short-video application, achieving remarkable performance gains across various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.