Improving Sequential Recommendation Models with an Enhanced Loss Function

Abstract: There has been a growing interest in benchmarking sequential recommendation models and reproducing/improving existing models. For example, Rendle et al. improved matrix factorization models by tuning their parameters and hyperparameters. Petrov and Macdonald developed a more efficient and effective implementation of BERT4Rec, which resolved inconsistencies in performance comparison between BERT4Rec and SASRec in previous works. In particular, BERT4Rec and SASRec share a similar network structure, with the main difference lying in their training objective/loss function. Therefore, we analyzed the advantages and disadvantages of commonly used loss functions in sequential recommendation and proposed an improved loss function that leverages their strengths. We conduct extensive experiments on two influential open-source libraries, and the results demonstrate that our improved loss function significantly enhances the performance of GRU4Rec, SASRec, SR-GNN, and S3Rec models, improving their benchmarks significantly. Furthermore, the improved SASRec benchmark outperforms BERT4Rec on the ML-1M and Beauty datasets and achieves similar results to BERT4Rec on the ML-20M and Steam datasets. We also reproduce the results of the BERT4Rec model on the Beauty dataset. Finally, we provide a comprehensive explanation of the effectiveness of our improved loss function through experiments. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Li-fAngyU/sequential_rec.