# Leveraging Negative Signals with Self-Attention for Sequential Music Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11623 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11623/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Personalized Top-N Sequential Recommendation via Convolutional Sequence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07426/) (2018)
- [A Simple Convolutional Generative Network for Next Item Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.05163/) (2018)
- [Personalizing Session-based Recommendations with Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04148/) (2017)
- [LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08191/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Learning for Debiased Candidate Generation in Large-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12964/) (2020)
- [The Music Streaming Sessions Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09851/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Negative Feedback for Music Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04488/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Music streaming services heavily rely on their recommendation engines to continuously provide content to their consumers. Sequential recommendation consequently has seen considerable attention in current literature, where state of the art approaches focus on self-attentive models leveraging contextual information such as long and short-term user history and item features; however, most of these studies focus on long-form content domains (retail, movie, etc.) rather than short-form, such as music. Additionally, many do not explore incorporating negative session-level feedback during training. In this study, we investigate the use of transformer-based self-attentive architectures to learn implicit session-level information for sequential music recommendation. We additionally propose a contrastive learning task to incorporate negative feedback (e.g skipped tracks) to promote positive hits and penalize negative hits. This task is formulated as a simple loss term that can be incorporated into a variety of deep learning architectures for sequential recommendation. Our experiments show that this results in consistent performance gains over the baseline architectures ignoring negative user feedback.