A Meta-adversarial Framework for Cross-Domain Cold-Start Recommendation

Abstract The cold-start problem in recommender systems has been facing a great challenge. Cross-domain recommendation can improve the performance of cold-start user recommendations in the target domain by using the rich information of users in the source domain. In cross-domain cold-start recommendation, users in target domain lack sufficient historical behaviors. Existing meta-learning-based methods depend on the feature distribution of training data and limit the adaptability in new tasks. To address these issues, we propose a m eta- a dversarial f ramework for c ross- d omain cold-start r ecommendation (MAFCDR) . Specifically, we employ a multi-level feature attention mechanism for independently learning the weights of long-term and short-term features to construct preferences of users in source domain. To migrate user representations, we train a meta-adversarial network that utilizes feature embeddings in the source domain as input and enhances the robustness and stability of the model. Then, the personalized bridge function transfers the user preferences in the source domain to the target domain. We build three cross-domain tasks using Amazon dataset and conduct extensive experiments, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in cold-start user recommendation.