Modern neural collaborative filtering techniques are critical to the success
of e-commerce, social media, and content-sharing platforms. However, despite
technical advances -- for every new application domain, we need to train an NCF
model from scratch. In contrast, pre-trained vision and language models are
routinely applied to diverse applications directly (zero-shot) or with limited
fine-tuning. Inspired by the impact of pre-trained models, we explore the
possibility of pre-trained recommender models that support building recommender
systems in new domains, with minimal or no retraining, without the use of any
auxiliary user or item information. Zero-shot recommendation without auxiliary
information is challenging because we cannot form associations between users
and items across datasets when there are no overlapping users or items. Our
fundamental insight is that the statistical characteristics of the user-item
interaction matrix are universally available across different domains and
datasets. Thus, we use the statistical characteristics of the user-item
interaction matrix to identify dataset-independent representations for users
and items. We show how to learn universal (i.e., supporting zero-shot
adaptation without user or item auxiliary information) representations for
nodes and edges from the bipartite user-item interaction graph. We learn
representations by exploiting the statistical properties of the interaction
data, including user and item marginals, and the size and density distributions
of their clusters.

通过利用用户 - 物品交互矩阵的统计特性，我们学习了用于支持无需用户或物品辅助信息的零 - shot 自适应（zero-shot recommendation）的通用表示，从而探索了预训练推荐模型在新领域构建推荐系统的可能性。