# Time-aware Self-Attention Meets Logic Reasoning in Recommender Systems

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.13330 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13330/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.04025/) (2015)
- [Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04757/) (2015)
- [Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06939/) (2015)
- [Predicting Dynamic Embedding Trajectory in Temporal Interaction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01207/) (2019)
- [Residual Attention Network for Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06904/) (2017)
- [Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06902/) (2019)
- [Attentional Factorization Machines: Learning the Weight of Feature Interactions via Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04617/) (2017)
- [Collaborative Deep Learning for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.2944/) (2014)
- [Joint Deep Modeling of Users and Items Using Reviews for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04783/) (2017)
- [Continuous-Time Sequential Recommendation with Temporal Graph Collaborative Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06625/) (2021)
- [A Troubling Analysis of Reproducibility and Progress in Recommender Systems Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07698/) (2019)
- [Neural Logic Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09514/) (2020)
- [Neural Collaborative Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08129/) (2020)
- [D'ej`a vu: A Contextualized Temporal Attention Mechanism for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00741/) (2020)
- [Critically Examining the Claimed Value of Convolutions over User-Item Embedding Maps for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11893/) (2020)
- [Interacting Attention-gated Recurrent Networks for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01532/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

At the age of big data, recommender systems have shown remarkable success as a key means of information filtering in our daily life. Recent years have witnessed the technical development of recommender systems, from perception learning to cognition reasoning which intuitively build the task of recommendation as the procedure of logical reasoning and have achieve significant improvement. However, the logical statement in reasoning implicitly admits irrelevance of ordering, even does not consider time information which plays an important role in many recommendation tasks. Furthermore, recommendation model incorporated with temporal context would tend to be self-attentive, i.e., automatically focus more (less) on the relevance (irrelevance), respectively. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a Time-aware Self-Attention with Neural Collaborative Reasoning (TiSANCR) based recommendation model, which integrates temporal patterns and self-attention mechanism into reasoning-based recommendation. Specially, temporal patterns represented by relative time, provide context and auxiliary information to characterize the user's preference in recommendation, while self-attention is leveraged to distill informative patterns and suppress irrelevances. Therefore, the fusion of self-attentive temporal information provides deeper representation of user's preference. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed TiSANCR achieves significant improvement and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation methods.