An Active Masked Attention Framework for Many-to-Many Cross-Domain Recommendations

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been proposed to improve the recommendation accuracy in the target domain (the sparser dataset) by benefiting from the auxiliary information transferred or the knowledge learned from one or many source domains (the denser datasets). However, most of the existing CDR approaches still suffer from the problem of negative transfer caused by undifferentiated knowledge transfer, and thus the recommendation accuracy in some domains, especially in the sparser domains, is still too low, which is not practical in real application scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a novel Active Masked Attention framework, i.e., AMA-CDR, for many-to-many CDR scenarios. Our AMA-CDR pursues a higher goal for CDR approaches, i.e., improving the recommendation performance in the target domain to achieve a practically usable level, which is meaningful and challenging in real CDR systems. Specifically, AMA-CDR adopts an end-to-end graph embedding to reduce the objective distortion between graph embedding and embedding combination. More importantly, we propose an active mask for the embedding combination to ease negative transfer, which leverages both the prior knowledge, i.e., data density, and the posterior knowledge, i.e., sample uncertainty. Extensive experiments conducted on two public datasets demonstrate that our proposed AMA-CDR models significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches and achieve the new goal.