In recent years, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been shown to be highly effective in both standard collaborative filtering applications and extensions such as incorporation of implicit feedback. We extend VAEs to collaborative filtering with side information, for instance when ratings are combined with explicit text feedback from the user. Instead of using a user-agnostic standard Gaussian prior, we incorporate user-dependent priors in the latent VAE space to encode users' preferences as functions of the review text. Taking into account both the rating and the text information to represent users in this multimodal latent space is promising to improve recommendation quality. Our proposed model is shown to outperform the existing VAE models for collaborative filtering (up to 29.41% relative improvement in ranking metric) along with other baselines that incorporate both user ratings and text for item recommendation.

本文提出了一种在 Variational Autoencoders 框架下利用用户评论文本并加入用户自适应先验来提高协同过滤推荐质量的方法，实验证明该方法比已有的基于用户评分与文本的推荐模型有更高的排名指标。

使用变分自编码器和异质先验进行物品推荐