Deep Cross Networks with Aesthetic Preference for Cross-domain Recommendation

Abstract: When purchasing appearance-first products, e.g., clothes, product appearance aesthetics plays an important role in the decision process. Moreover, user's aesthetic preference, which can be regarded as a personality trait and a basic requirement, is domain independent and could be used as a bridge between domains for knowledge transfer. However, existing work has rarely considered the aesthetic information in product photos for cross-domain recommendation. To this end, in this paper, we propose a new deep Aesthetic preference Cross-Domain Network (ACDN), in which parameters characterizing personal aesthetic preferences are shared across networks to transfer knowledge between domains. Specifically, we first leverage an aesthetic network to extract relevant features. Then, we integrate the aesthetic features into a cross-domain network to transfer users' domain independent aesthetic preferences. Moreover, network cross-connections are introduced to enable dual knowledge transfer across domains. Finally, the experimental results on real-world data show that our proposed ACDN outperforms other benchmark methods in terms of recommendation accuracy. The results also show that users' aesthetic preferences are effective in alleviating the data sparsity issue on the cross-domain recommendation.