{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/learning-robust-sequential-recommenders","title":"Learning Robust Sequential Recommenders through Confident Soft Labels","arxiv_id":"2311.02446","date":"2023-11-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Shiguang Wu","Xin Xin","Pengjie Ren","Zhumin Chen","Jun Ma","Maarten de Rijke","Zhaochun Ren"],"abstract":"Sequential recommenders that are trained on implicit feedback are usually learned as a multi-class classification task through softmax-based loss functions on one-hot class labels. However, one-hot training labels are sparse and may lead to biased training and sub-optimal performance. Dense, soft labels have been shown to help improve recommendation performance. But how to generate high-quality and confident soft labels from noisy sequential interactions between users and items is still an open question. We propose a new learning framework for sequential recommenders, CSRec, which introduces confident soft labels to provide robust guidance when learning from user-item interactions. CSRec contains a teacher module that generates high-quality and confident soft labels and a student module that acts as the target recommender and is trained on the combination of dense, soft labels and sparse, one-hot labels. We propose and compare three approaches to constructing the teacher module: (i) model-level, (ii) data-level, and (iii) training-level. To evaluate the effectiveness and generalization ability of CSRec, we conduct experiments using various state-of-the-art sequential recommendation models as the target student module on four benchmark datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that CSRec is effective in training better performing sequential recommenders.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02446v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02446v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"learning-robust-sequential-recommenders","repo_url":"https://github.com/furyton/csrec","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multi-class-classification","task_name":"Multi-class Classification"},{"task_slug":"sequential-recommendation","task_name":"Sequential Recommendation"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}