Papers › Multi-Gradient Descent for Multi-Objective Recommender Systems

Multi-Gradient Descent for Multi-Objective Recommender Systems

9 Dec 2019arXiv:2001.00846archive 2025-07-28

Nikola Milojkovic, Diego Antognini, Giancarlo Bergamin, Boi Faltings, Claudiu Musat

Recommender systems need to mirror the complexity of the environment they are applied in. The more we know about what might benefit the user, the more objectives the recommender system has. In addition there may be multiple stakeholders - sellers, buyers, shareholders - in addition to legal and ethical constraints. Simultaneously optimizing for a multitude of objectives, correlated and not correlated, having the same scale or not, has proven difficult so far. We introduce a stochastic multi-gradient descent approach to recommender systems (MGDRec) to solve this problem. We show that this exceeds state-of-the-art methods in traditional objective mixtures, like revenue and recall. Not only that, but through gradient normalization we can combine fundamentally different objectives, having diverse scales, into a single coherent framework. We show that uncorrelated objectives, like the proportion of quality products, can be improved alongside accuracy. Through the use of stochasticity, we avoid the pitfalls of calculating full gradients and provide a clear setting for its applicability.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

swisscom/ai-research-mamo-framework mentioned 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

Recommendation Systems

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Recommendation Systems Amazon Books Multi-Gradient Descent Recall@20 0.285 #1 of 1 Archive leaderboard report
Recommendation Systems MovieLens 20M Multi-Gradient Descent Recall@20 0.418 #6 of 18 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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