A General Knowledge Distillation Framework for Counterfactual Recommendation via Uniform Data

Recommender systems are feedback loop systems, which often face bias problems such as popularity bias, previous model bias and position bias. In this paper, we focus on solving the bias problems in a recommender system via a uniform data. Through empirical studies in online and offline settings, we observe that simple modeling with a uniform data can alleviate the bias problems and improve the performance. However, the uniform data is always few and expensive to collect in a real product. In order to use the valuable uniform data more effectively, we propose a general knowledge distillation framework for counterfactual recommendation that enables uniform data modeling through four approaches: (1) label-based distillation focuses on using the imputed labels as a carrier to provide useful de-biasing guidance; (2) feature-based distillation aims to filter out the representative causal and stable features; (3) sample-based distillation considers mutual learning and alignment of the information of the uniform and non-uniform data; and (4) model structure-based distillation constrains the training of the models from the perspective of embedded representation. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and product datasets, demonstrating that the proposed four methods achieve better performance over the baseline models in terms of AUC and NLL. Moreover, we discuss the relation between the proposed methods and the previous works. We emphasize that counterfactual modeling with uniform data is a rich research area, and list some interesting and promising research topics worthy of further exploration. Note that the source codes are available at \urlhttps://github.com/dgliu/SIGIR20_KDCRec.