Integrating Item Relevance in Training Loss for Sequential Recommender Systems

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) are a popular type of recommender system that leverages user history to predict the next item of interest. However, the presence of noise in user interactions, stemming from account sharing, inconsistent preferences, or accidental clicks, can significantly impact the robustness and performance of SRSs, particularly when the entire item set to be predicted is noisy. This situation is more prevalent when only one item is used to train and evaluate the SRSs. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel approach that addresses the issue of noise in SRSs. First, we propose a sequential multi-relevant future items training objective, leveraging a loss function aware of item relevance, thereby enhancing their robustness against noise in the training data. Additionally, to mitigate the impact of noise at evaluation time, we propose multi-relevant future items evaluation (MRFI-evaluation), aiming to improve overall performance. Our relevance-aware models obtain an improvement of 1.58% of NDCG@10 and 0.96% in terms of HR@10 in the traditional evaluation protocol, the one which utilizes one relevant future item. In the MRFI-evaluation protocol, using multiple future items, the improvement is 2.82% of NDCG@10 and 0.64% of HR@10 w.r.t the best baseline model.