Papers › beeFormer: Bridging the Gap Between Semantic and Interaction Similarity in Recommender Systems

beeFormer: Bridging the Gap Between Semantic and Interaction Similarity in Recommender Systems

16 Sep 2024arXiv:2409.10309archive 2025-07-28

Vojtěch Vančura, Pavel Kordík, Milan Straka

Recommender systems often use text-side information to improve their predictions, especially in cold-start or zero-shot recommendation scenarios, where traditional collaborative filtering approaches cannot be used. Many approaches to text-mining side information for recommender systems have been proposed over recent years, with sentence Transformers being the most prominent one. However, these models are trained to predict semantic similarity without utilizing interaction data with hidden patterns specific to recommender systems. In this paper, we propose beeFormer, a framework for training sentence Transformer models with interaction data. We demonstrate that our models trained with beeFormer can transfer knowledge between datasets while outperforming not only semantic similarity sentence Transformers but also traditional collaborative filtering methods. We also show that training on multiple datasets from different domains accumulates knowledge in a single model, unlocking the possibility of training universal, domain-agnostic sentence Transformer models to mine text representations for recommender systems. We release the source code, trained models, and additional details allowing replication of our experiments at https://github.com/recombee/beeformer.

Paper PDF Code

Code

recombee/beeformer officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Systems Semantic Similarity Semantic Textual Similarity Sentence

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Absolute Position Encodings Adam Attention BPE Dense Connections Dropout Label Smoothing Layer Normalization Linear Layer Multi-Head Attention Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer Residual Connection Softmax Transformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections