Leaping Through Time with Gradient-based Adaptation for Recommendation

Modern recommender systems are required to adapt to the change in user preferences and item popularity. Such a problem is known as the temporal dynamics problem, and it is one of the main challenges in recommender system modeling. Different from the popular recurrent modeling approach, we propose a new solution named LeapRec to the temporal dynamic problem by using trajectory-based meta-learning to model time dependencies. LeapRec characterizes temporal dynamics by two complement components named global time leap (GTL) and ordered time leap (OTL). By design, GTL learns long-term patterns by finding the shortest learning path across unordered temporal data. Cooperatively, OTL learns short-term patterns by considering the sequential nature of the temporal data. Our experimental results show that LeapRec consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several datasets and recommendation metrics. Furthermore, we provide an empirical study of the interaction between GTL and OTL, showing the effects of long- and short-term modeling.