Sequential-based Adversarial Optimisation for Personalised Top-N Item Recommendation

Personalised top-N item recommendation systems aim to generate a ranked list of interesting items to users based on their interactions (e.g. click, purchase and rating). Recently, various sequential-based factorised approaches have been proposed to exploit deep neural networks to effectively capture the users' dynamic preferences from their sequences of interactions. These factorised approaches usually rely on a pairwise ranking objective such as the Bayesian Personalised Ranking (BPR) for optimisation. However, previous works have shown that optimising factorised approaches with BPR can hinder the generalisation, which can degrade the quality of item recommendations. To address this challenge, we propose a Sequential-based Adversarial Optimisation (SAO) framework that effectively enhances the generalisation of sequential-based factorised approaches. Comprehensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the SAO framework in enhancing the performance of the state-of-the-art sequential-based factorised approach in terms of NDCG by 3-14%.