Attention-Enhanced Graph Neural Networks for Session-Based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation, which aims to match user needs with rich resources based on anonymous sessions, nowadays plays a critical role in various online platforms (e.g., media streaming sites, search and e-commerce). Existing recommendation algorithms usually model a session as a sequence or a session graph to model transitions between items. Despite their effectiveness, we would argue that the performance of these methods is still flawed: (1) Using only fixed session item embedding without considering the diversity of users’ interests and target items. (2) For user’s long-term interest, the difficulty of capturing the different priorities for different items accurately. To tackle these defects, we propose a novel model which leverages both the target attentive network and self-attention network to improve the graph-neural-network (GNN)-based recommender. In our model, we first model user’s interaction sequences as session graphs which serves as the input of the GNN, and each node vector involved in session graph can be obtained via the GNN. Next, target attentive network can activates different user interests corresponding to varied target items (i.e., the session embedding learned varies with different target items), which can reveal the relevance between users’ interests and target items. At last, after applying the self-attention mechanism, the different priorities for different items can be captured to improve the precision of the long-term session representation. By using a hybrid of long-term and short-term session representation, we can capture users’ comprehensive interests at multiple levels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on two real-world datasets for session-based recommendation.