# Train Once, Use Flexibly: A Modular Framework for Multi-Aspect Neural News Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16089/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jul 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [News Without Borders: Domain Adaptation of Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Cross-lingual News Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12634/) (2024)
- [A Survey on LLM-based News Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09797/) (2025)
- [Peeling Back the Layers: An In-Depth Evaluation of Encoder Architectures in Neural News Recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01470/) (2024)
- [A Look Into News Avoidance Through AWRS: An Avoidance-Aware Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09137/) (2024)
- [Towards Multi-Aspect Diversification of News Recommendations Using Neuro-Symbolic AI for Individual and Societal Benefit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02220/) (2025)
- [ZoRRO: A Zero-Weight Personalized Recommender System for Scalable News Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10910/) (2026)
- [Normative Alignment of Recommender Systems via Internal Label Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10915/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent neural news recommenders (NNRs) extend content-based recommendation (1) by aligning additional aspects (e.g., topic, sentiment) between candidate news and user history or (2) by diversifying recommendations w.r.t. these aspects. This customization is achieved by ``hardcoding`` additional constraints into the NNR's architecture and/or training objectives: any change in the desired recommendation behavior thus requires retraining the model with a modified objective. This impedes widespread adoption of multi-aspect news recommenders. In this work, we introduce MANNeR, a modular framework for multi-aspect neural news recommendation that supports on-the-fly customization over individual aspects at inference time. With metric-based learning as its backbone, MANNeR learns aspect-specialized news encoders and then flexibly and linearly combines the resulting aspect-specific similarity scores into different ranking functions, alleviating the need for ranking function-specific retraining of the model. Extensive experimental results show that MANNeR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art NNRs on both standard content-based recommendation and single- and multi-aspect customization. Lastly, we validate that MANNeR's aspect-customization module is robust to language and domain transfer.