# Towards Explainable Personalized Recommendations by Learning from Users' Photos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21455 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21455/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04467/) (2016)
- [VBPR: Visual Bayesian Personalized Ranking from Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.01784/) (2015)
- [Neural Optimizer Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07417/) (2017)
- [Visually-Aware Fashion Recommendation and Design with Generative Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02231/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Training Towards Robust Multimedia Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07062/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Explaining the output of a complex system, such as a Recommender System (RS), is becoming of utmost importance for both users and companies. In this paper we explore the idea that personalized explanations can be learned as recommendation themselves. There are plenty of online services where users can upload some photos, in addition to rating items. We assume that users take these photos to reinforce or justify their opinions about the items. For this reason we try to predict what photo a user would take of an item, because that image is the argument that can best convince her of the qualities of the item. In this sense, an RS can explain its results and, therefore, increase its reliability. Furthermore, once we have a model to predict attractive images for users, we can estimate their distribution. Thus, the companies acquire a vivid knowledge about the aspects that the clients highlight of their products. The paper includes a formal framework that estimates the authorship probability for a given pair (user, photo). To illustrate the proposal, we use data gathered from TripAdvisor containing the reviews (with photos) of restaurants in six cities of different sizes.