Sparse Enhanced Network: An Adversarial Generation Method for Robust Augmentation in Sequential Recommendation

Abstract

Sequential Recommendation plays a significant role in daily recommendation systems, such as e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Taobao. However, even with the advent of large models, these platforms often face sparse issues in the historical browsing records of individual users due to new users joining or the introduction of new products. As a result, existing sequence recommendation algorithms may not perform well. To address this, sequence-based data augmentation methods have garnered attention. Existing sequence enhancement methods typically rely on augmenting existing data, employing techniques like cropping, masking prediction, random reordering, and random replacement of the original sequence. While these methods have shown improvements, they often overlook the exploration of the deep embedding space of the sequence. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Sparse Enhanced Network (SparseEnNet), which is a robust adversarial generation method. SparseEnNet aims to fully explore the hidden space in sequence recommendation, generating more robust enhanced items. Additionally, we adopt an adversarial generation method, allowing the model to differentiate between data augmentation categories and achieve better prediction performance for the next item in the sequence. Experiments have demonstrated that our method achieves a remarkable 4-14% improvement over existing methods when evaluated on the real-world datasets. (https://github.com/junyachen/SparseEnNet)