Transformers4Rec: Bridging the Gap between NLP and Sequential / Session-Based Recommendation

Much of the recent progress in sequential and session-based recommendation has been driven by improvements in model architecture and pretraining techniques originating in the field of Natural Language Processing. Transformer architectures in particular have facilitated building higher-capacity models and provided data augmentation and training techniques which demonstrably improve the effectiveness of sequential recommendation. But with a thousandfold more research going on in NLP, the application of transformers for recommendation understandably lags behind. To remedy this we introduce Transformers4Rec, an open-source library built upon HuggingFace’s Transformers library with a similar goal of opening up the advances of NLP based Transformers to the recommender system community and making these advancements immediately accessible for the tasks of sequential and session-based recommendation. Like its core dependency, Transformers4Rec is designed to be extensible by researchers, simple for practitioners, and fast and robust in industrial deployments.