Sequential Recommendation with Controllable Diversification: Representation Degeneration and Diversity

Sequential recommendation (SR) models the dynamic user preferences and generates the next-item prediction as the affinity between the sequence and items, in a joint latent space with low dimensions (i.e., the sequence and item embedding space). Both sequence and item representations suffer from the representation degeneration issue due to the user/item long-tail distributions, where tail users/ items are indistinguishably distributed as a narrow cone in the latent space. We argue that the representation degeneration issue is the root cause of insufficient recommendation diversity in existing SR methods, impairing the user potential exploration and further worsening the echo chamber issue. In this work, we first disclose the connection between the representation degeneration and recommendation diversity, in which severer representation degeneration indicates lower recommendation diversity. We then propose a novel Singular sPectrum sMoothing regularization for Recommendation (SPMRec), which acts as a controllable surrogate to alleviate the degeneration and achieve the balance between recommendation diversity and performance. The proposed smoothing regularization alleviates the degeneration by maximizing the area under the singular value curve, which is also the diversity surrogate. We conduct experiments on four benchmark datasets to demonstrate the superiority of SPMRec, and show that the proposed singular spectrum smoothing can control the balance of recommendation performance and diversity simultaneously.