Deep Sequential Recommendation for Personalized Adaptive User Interfaces

Adaptive user-interfaces (AUIs) can enhance the usability of complex software by providing real-time contextual adaptation and assistance. Ideally, AUIs should be personalized and versatile, i.e., able to adapt to each user who may perform a variety of complex tasks. But this is difficult to achieve with many interaction elements when data-per-user is sparse. In this paper, we propose an architecture for personalized AUIs that leverages upon developments in (1) deep learning, particularly gated recurrent units, to efficiently learn user interaction patterns, (2) collaborative filtering techniques that enable sharing of data among users, and (3) fast approximate nearest-neighbor methods in Euclidean spaces for quick UI control and/or content recommendations. Specifically, interaction histories are embedded in a learned space along with users and interaction elements; this allows the AUI to query and recommend likely next actions based on similar usage patterns across the user base. In a comparative evaluation on user-interface, web-browsing and e-learning datasets, the deep recurrent neural-network (DRNN) outperforms state-of-the-art tensor-factorization and metric embedding methods.