Sequential recommender systems aim to predict users' next interested item given their historical interactions. However, a long-standing issue is how to distinguish between users' long/short-term interests, which may be heterogeneous and contribute differently to the next recommendation. Existing approaches usually set pre-defined short-term interest length by exhaustive search or empirical experience, which is either highly inefficient or yields subpar results. The recent advanced transformer-based models can achieve state-of-the-art performances despite the aforementioned issue, but they have a quadratic computational complexity to the length of the input sequence. To this end, this paper proposes a novel sequential recommender system, AutoMLP, aiming for better modeling users' long/short-term interests from their historical interactions. In addition, we design an automated and adaptive search algorithm for preferable short-term interest length via end-to-end optimization. Through extensive experiments, we show that AutoMLP has competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining linear computational complexity.
@article{arxiv.2303.06337,
title = {AutoMLP: Automated MLP for Sequential Recommendations},
author = {Muyang Li and Zijian Zhang and Xiangyu Zhao and Wanyu Wang and Minghao Zhao and Runze Wu and Ruocheng Guo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.06337},
year = {2023}
}