Adversarial Propensity Weighting for Debiasing in Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

Debiased recommendation focuses on alleviating the negative impact of various biases on recommendation quality to achieve fairer personalized recommendations. Current research mainly relies on propensity score estimation or causal inference methods to alleviate selection bias; at the same time, research on prevalence bias has proposed a variety of methods based on causal graphs and contrastive learning. However, these methods have shortcomings in dealing with unstable propensity score estimates, bias interactions, and decoupling of interest and bias signals, which limits the performance improvement of recommender systems. To this end, this paper proposes APWCF, a collaborative filtering debiased method that combines dynamic propensity modeling and adversarial learning. APWCF solves the problem of high variance in propensity scores through the dynamic propensity factor, and decouples user interests and bias signals through the adversarial learning to effectively remove multiple biases. Experiments show that APWCF significantly outperforms existing methods across various benchmark datasets from different domains. Compared with the current optimal baseline PDA, Recall@10 and NDCG@10 improve by 0.10%-5.42% and 1.01%-8.60% respectively.