Learning Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation

This repository contains the replication of the paper "Text Is All You Need: Learning Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation", a model learns natural language representations for sequential recommendation.

The KDD 2023 paper Text Is All You Need: Learning Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation.

Quick Links

• Overview
• Dependencies
• Pretraining
• Pretrained Model
• Finetuning
• Contact
• Citation

Overview

In this paper, the authors propose to model user preferences and item features as language representations that can be generalized to new items and datasets. To this end, the authors present a novel framework, named Recformer, which effectively learns language representations for sequential recommendation. Specifically, the authors propose to formulate an item as a "sentence" (word sequence) by flattening item key-value attributes described by text so that an item sequence for a user becomes a sequence of sentences. For recommendation, Recformer is trained to understand the "sentence" sequence and retrieve the next "sentence". To encode item sequences, the authors design a bi-directional Transformer similar to the model Longformer but with different embedding layers for sequential recommendation. For effective representation learning, the authors propose novel pretraining and finetuning methods which combine language understanding and recommendation tasks. Therefore, Recformer can effectively recommend the next item based on language representations.

Dependencies

Train and test the model using the following main dependencies:

• Python 3.10.10
• PyTorch 2.0.0
• PyTorch Lightning 2.0.0
• Transformers 4.28.0
• Deepspeed 0.9.0

Pretraining

Dataset

8 categories in Amazon dataset for pretraining:

Training:

• Automotive
• Cell Phones and Accessories
• Clothing, Shoes and Jewelry
• Electronics
• Grocery and Gourmet Food
• Home and Kitchen
• Movies and TV

Validation:

• CDs and Vinyl

You can process these data using the provided scripts pretrain_data/meta_data_process.py and pretrain_data/interaction_data_process.py. You need to set meta data path META_ROOT and interaction data path SEQ_ROOT in the two files. Then run the following commands:

cd pretrain_data
python meta_data_process.py
python interaction_data_process.py

Or, you can download the processed data from here.

Training

The pretraining code is based on the framework Pytorch-Lightning. The backbone model is allenai/longformer-base-4096 but there are different token type embedding and item position embedding.

First, you need to adjust pretrained Longformer checkpoint to the model. You can run the following command:

python save_longformer_ckpt.py

This code will automatically download allenai/longformer-base-4096 from Huggingface then adjust and save it to longformer_ckpt/longformer-base-4096.bin.

Then, you can pretrain your own model with the default settings by running the following command:

bash lightning_run.sh

If you use the training strategy deepspeed_stage_2 (default setting in the script), you need to first convert zero checkpoint to lightning checkpoint by running zero_to_fp32.py (automatically generated to checkpoint folder from pytorch-lightning):

python zero_to_fp32.py . pytorch_model.bin

Finally, please convert the lightning checkpoint to pytorch checkpoint (they have different model parameter names) by running convert_pretrain_ckpt.py:

python convert_pretrain_ckpt.py

You need to set four paths in the file:

• LIGHTNING_CKPT_PATH, pretrained lightning checkpoint path.
• LONGFORMER_CKPT_PATH, Longformer checkpoint (from save_longformer_ckpt.py) path.
• OUTPUT_CKPT_PATH, output path of Recformer checkpoint (for class RecformerModel in recformer/models.py).
• OUTPUT_CONFIG_PATH, output path of Recformer for Sequential Recommendation checkpoint (for class RecformerForSeqRec in recformer/models.py).

Pretrained Model

We reproduce pretrained checkpoints for RecformerModel and RecformerForSeqRec used in the KDD paper (allenai/longformer-base-4096 as backbone).

Model
RecformerModel
RecformerForSeqRec

You can load the pretrained model by running the following code:

import torch
from recformer import RecformerModel, RecformerConfig, RecformerForSeqRec

config = RecformerConfig.from_pretrained('allenai/longformer-base-4096')
config.max_attr_num = 3  # max number of attributes for each item
config.max_attr_length = 32 # max number of tokens for each attribute
config.max_item_embeddings = 51 # max number of items in a sequence +1 for cls token
config.attention_window = [64] * 12 # attention window for each layer

model = RecformerModel(config)
model.load_state_dict(torch.load('recformer_ckpt.bin'))

model = RecformerForSeqRec(config)
model.load_state_dict(torch.load('recformer_seqrec_ckpt.bin'), strict=False)
# strict=False because RecformerForSeqRec doesn't have lm_head

Finetuning

Dataset

We use 6 categories in Amazon dataset to evaluate our model:

• Industrial and Scientific
• Musical Instruments
• Arts, Crafts and Sewing
• Office Products
• Video Games
• Pet Supplies

You can process these data using our provided scripts finetune_data/process.py. You need to set meta data path --meta_file_path, interaction data path --file_path and output path --output_path to run the following commands:

cd finetune_data
python process.py --meta_file_path META_PATH --file_path SEQ_PATH --output_path OUTPUT_FOLDER

We also provide all processed data like this paper here.

Training

We train RecformerForSeqRec with two-stage finetuning like the KDD paper to conduct the sequential recommendation with Recformer. A sample script is provided for finetuning:

bash finetune.sh

Our code will train and evaluate the model for the sequential recommendation task and return all metrics reported in that KDD paper.

Note: from our empirical results, you can set a smaller maximum length (512 or 256, our model is default to 1024) of Recformer e.g., config.max_token_num = 512 to obtain more efficient finetuning and inference without obvious performance decay (128 has an obvious decay).

Contact

If you have any questions related to the code or the paper, feel free to create an issue or email Jiacheng Li (j9li@ucsd.edu), the corresponding author of the KDD paper. Thanks!

Citation

Please cite the paper if you use Recformer in your work:

@article{Li2023TextIA,
  title={Text Is All You Need: Learning Language Representations for Sequential Recommendation},
  author={Jiacheng Li and Ming Wang and Jin Li and Jinmiao Fu and Xin Shen and Jingbo Shang and Julian McAuley},
  journal={Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining},
  year={2023}
}