Deep Critiquing for VAE-based Recommender Systems

Providing explanations for recommended items not only allows users to understand the reason for receiving recommendations but also provides users with an opportunity to refine recommendations by critiquing undesired parts of the explanation. While much research focuses on improving the explanation of recommendations, less effort has focused on interactive recommendation by allowing a user to critique explanations. Aside from traditional constraint- and utility-based critiquing systems, the only end-to-end deep learning based critiquing approach in the literature so far, CE-VNCF, suffers from unstable and inefficient training performance. In this paper, we propose a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) based critiquing system to mitigate these issues and improve overall performance. The proposed model generates keyphrase-based explanations of recommendations and allows users to critique the generated explanations to refine their personalized recommendations. Our experiments show promising results: (1) The proposed model is competitive in terms of general performance in comparison to state-of-the-art recommenders, despite having an augmented loss function to support explanation and critiquing. (2) The proposed model can generate high-quality explanations compared to user or item keyphrase popularity baselines. (3) The proposed model is more effective in refining recommendations based on critiquing than CE-VNCF, where the rank of critiquing-affected items drops while general recommendation performance remains stable. In summary, this paper presents a significantly improved method for multi-step deep critiquing based recommender systems based on the VAE framework.