{"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/towards-principled-user-side-recommender","title":"Towards Principled User-side Recommender Systems","arxiv_id":"2208.09864","date":"2022-08-21","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ryoma Sato"],"abstract":"Traditionally, recommendation algorithms have been designed for service developers. However, recently, a new paradigm called user-side recommender systems has been proposed and they enable web service users to construct their own recommender systems without access to trade-secret data. This approach opens the door to user-defined fair systems even if the official recommender system of the service is not fair. While existing methods for user-side recommender systems have addressed the challenging problem of building recommender systems without using log data, they rely on heuristic approaches, and it is still unclear whether constructing user-side recommender systems is a well-defined problem from theoretical point of view. In this paper, we provide theoretical justification of user-side recommender systems. Specifically, we see that hidden item features can be recovered from the information available to the user, making the construction of user-side recommender system well-defined. However, this theoretically grounded approach is not efficient. To realize practical yet theoretically sound recommender systems, we propose three desirable properties of user-side recommender systems and propose an effective and efficient user-side recommender system, \\textsc{Consul}, based on these foundations. We prove that \\textsc{Consul} satisfies all three properties, whereas existing user-side recommender systems lack at least one of them. In the experiments, we empirically validate the theory of feature recovery via numerical experiments. We also show that our proposed method achieves an excellent trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency and demonstrate via case studies that the proposed method can retrieve information that the provider's official recommender system cannot.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.09864v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.09864v1.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":"towards-principled-user-side-recommender","repo_url":"https://github.com/joisino/consul","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":null,"method_name":null}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2208.09864","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2208.09864"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/joisino/consul","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":3,"ran_violates":1,"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":5,"ran":5,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"1237f73215820dca","entry":"convert","repo":"joisino/consul","repo_kind":"official","path":"LOE_adult.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joisino/consul/blob/HEAD/LOE_adult.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"1237f73215820dca"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"1898012c0925e1a0","entry":"convert_x","repo":"joisino/consul","repo_kind":"official","path":"LOE_adult.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joisino/consul/blob/HEAD/LOE_adult.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"1898012c0925e1a0"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"77895ff4ecf82f5c","entry":"list_minimum_group","repo":"joisino/consul","repo_kind":"official","path":"evaluate.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joisino/consul/blob/HEAD/evaluate.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"77895ff4ecf82f5c"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"b2bf39afd684ed55","entry":"nDCG","repo":"joisino/consul","repo_kind":"official","path":"evaluate.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joisino/consul/blob/HEAD/evaluate.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_violates","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"VIOLATES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"b2bf39afd684ed55"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"270b9fb5d91ad8a7","entry":"recall","repo":"joisino/consul","repo_kind":"official","path":"evaluate.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joisino/consul/blob/HEAD/evaluate.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"270b9fb5d91ad8a7"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}