A standard approach to Collaborative Filtering (CF), i.e. prediction of user
ratings on items, relies on Matrix Factorization techniques. Representations
for both users and items are computed from the observed ratings and used for
prediction. Unfortunatly, these transductive approaches cannot handle the case
of new users arriving in the system, with no known rating, a problem known as
user cold-start. A common approach in this context is to ask these incoming
users for a few initialization ratings. This paper presents a model to tackle
this twofold problem of (i) finding good questions to ask, (ii) building
efficient representations from this small amount of information. The model can
also be used in a more standard (warm) context. Our approach is evaluated on
the classical CF problem and on the cold-start problem on four different
datasets showing its ability to improve baseline performance in both cases.

本研究提出一种模型，在用户冷启动情况下，通过提问找到一些初始化评分，并用这些信息建立有效的代表，以解决协同过滤问题。这种方法在四个不同数据集上得到验证，并改善了基准性能。