Efficient Content-based Recommendation Model Training via Noise-aware Coreset Selection

Content-based recommendation systems (CRSs) utilize content features to predict user-item interactions, serving as essential tools for helping users navigate information-rich web services. However, ensuring the effectiveness of CRSs requires large-scale and even continuous model training to accommodate diverse user preferences, resulting in significant computational costs and resource demands. A promising approach to this challenge is coreset selection, which identifies a small but representative subset of data samples that preserves model quality while reducing training overhead. Yet, the selected coreset is vulnerable to the pervasive noise in user-item interactions, particularly when it is minimally sized. To this end, we propose Noise-aware Coreset Selection (NaCS), a specialized framework for CRSs. NaCS constructs coresets through submodular optimization based on training gradients, while simultaneously correcting noisy labels using a progressively trained model. Meanwhile, we refine the selected coreset by filtering out low-confidence samples through uncertainty quantification, thereby avoid training with unreliable interactions. Through extensive experiments, we show that NaCS produces higher-quality coresets for CRSs while achieving better efficiency than existing coreset selection techniques. Notably, NaCS recovers 93-95\% of full-dataset training performance using merely 1\% of the training data. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/chenxing1999/nacs}{https://github.com/chenxing1999/nacs}.