A Universal Sets-level Optimization Framework for Next Set Recommendation

Next Set Recommendation (NSRec), encompassing related tasks such as next basket recommendation and temporal sets prediction, stands as a trending research topic. Although numerous attempts have been made on this topic, there are certain drawbacks: (i) Existing studies are still confined to utilizing objective functions commonly found in Next Item Recommendation (NIRec), such as binary cross entropy and BPR, which are calculated based on individual item comparisons; (ii) They place emphasis on building sophisticated learning models to capture intricate dependency relationships across sequential sets, but frequently overlook pivotal dependency in their objective functions; (iii) Diversity factor within sequential sets is frequently overlooked. In this research, we endeavor to unveil a universal and Sets-level optimization framework for Next Set Recommendation (SNSRec), offering a holistic fusion of diversity distribution and intricate dependency relationships within temporal sets. To realize this, the following contributions are made: (i) We directly model the temporal set in a sequence as a cohesive entity, leveraging the Structured Determinantal Point Process (SDPP), wherein the probabilistic DPP distribution prioritizes collections of structures (sequential sets) instead of individual items; (ii) We introduce a co-occurrence representation to discern and acknowledge the importance of different sets; (iii) We propose a sets-level optimization criterion, which integrates the diversity distribution and dependency relations across the entire sequence of sets, guiding the model to recommend relevant and diversified set. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms previous methods on both relevance and diversity.