Compositions of Variant Experts for Integrating Short-Term and Long-Term Preferences

In the online digital realm, recommendation systems are ubiquitous and play a crucial role in enhancing user experience. These systems leverage user preferences to provide personalized recommendations, thereby helping users navigate through the paradox of choice. This work focuses on personalized sequential recommendation, where the system considers not only a user's immediate, evolving session context, but also their cumulative historical behavior to provide highly relevant and timely recommendations. Through an empirical study conducted on diverse real-world datasets, we have observed and quantified the existence and impact of both short-term (immediate and transient) and long-term (enduring and stable) preferences on users' historical interactions. Building on these insights, we propose a framework that combines short- and long-term preferences to enhance recommendation performance, namely Compositions of Variant Experts (CoVE). This novel framework dynamically integrates short- and long-term preferences through the use of different specialized recommendation models (i.e., experts). Extensive experiments showcase the effectiveness of the proposed methods and ablation studies further investigate the impact of variant expert types.