Learning Unified Embeddings for Recommendation via Meta-path Semantics

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) have become a popular tool to capture complicated user-item relationships in recommendation problems in recent years. As a typical instantiation of HINs, meta-path is introduced in search of higher-level representations of user-item interactions. Though remarkable success has been achieved along this direction, existing meta-path-based recommendation methods face at least one of the following issues: 1) existing methods merely adopt simple meta-path fusion rules, which might be insufficient to exclude inconsistent information of different meta-paths that may hurt model performance; 2) the representative power is limited by shallow/stage-wise formulations. To solve these issues, we propose an end-to-end and unified embedding-based recommendation framework with graph-based learning. To address 1), we propose a flexible fusion module to integrate meta-path-based similarities into relative similarities between users and items. To address 2), we take advantage of the powerful representative ability of deep neural networks to learn more complicated and flexible latent embeddings. Finally, empirical studies on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.