text: Understanding users' interactions with highly subjective content---like artistic images---is challenging due to the complex semantics that guide our preferences. On the one hand one has to overcome standard' recommender systems challenges, such as dealing with large, sparse, and long-tailed datasets. On the other, several new challenges present themselves, such as the need to model content in terms of its visual appearance, or even social dynamics, such as a preference toward a particular artist that is independent of the art they create. In this paper we build large-scale recommender systems to model the dynamics of a vibrant digital art community, Behance, consisting of tens of millions of interactions (clicks and 'appreciates') of users toward digital art. Methodologically, our main contributions are to model (a) rich content, especially in terms of its visual appearance; (b) temporal dynamics, in terms of how users prefer 'visually consistent' content within and across sessions; and (c) social dynamics, in terms of how users exhibit preferences both towards certain art styles, as well as the artists themselves.
  @cite_28: Digital storage of personal music collections and cloud-based music services (e.g. Pandora, Spotify) have fundamentally changed how music is consumed. In particular, automatically generated playlists have become an important mode of accessing large music collections. The key goal of automated playlist generation is to provide the user with a coherent listening experience. In this paper, we present Latent Markov Embedding (LME), a machine learning algorithm for generating such playlists. In analogy to matrix factorization methods for collaborative filtering, the algorithm does not require songs to be described by features a priori, but it learns a representation from example playlists. We formulate this problem as a regularized maximum-likelihood embedding of Markov chains in Euclidian space, and show how the resulting optimization problem can be solved efficiently. An empirical evaluation shows that the LME is substantially more accurate than adaptations of smoothed n-gram models commonly used in natural language processing.
  @cite_5: The rapidly growing of Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) provides a vast amount of check-in data, which enables many services, e.g., point-of-interest (POI) recommendation. In this paper, we study the next new POI recommendation problem in which new POIs with respect to users' current location are to be recommended. The challenge lies in the difficulty in precisely learning users' sequential information and personalizing the recommendation model. To this end, we resort to the Metric Embedding method for the recommendation, which avoids drawbacks of the Matrix Factorization technique. We propose a personalized ranking metric embedding method (PRME) to model personalized check-in sequences. We further develop a PRME-G model, which integrates sequential information, individual preference, and geographical influence, to improve the recommendation performance. Experiments on two real-world LBSN datasets demonstrate that our new algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art next POI recommendation methods.
  @cite_22: Learning algorithms that embed objects into Euclidean space have become the methods of choice for a wide range of problems, ranging from recommendation and image search to playlist prediction and language modeling. Probabilistic embedding methods provide elegant approaches to these problems, but can be expensive to train and store as a large monolithic model. In this paper, we propose a method that trains not one monolithic model, but multiple local embeddings for a class of pairwise conditional models especially suited for sequence and co-occurrence modeling. We show that computation and memory for training these multi-space models can be efficiently parallelized over many nodes of a cluster. Focusing on sequence modeling for music playlists, we show that the method substantially speeds up training while maintaining high model quality.
summary: Notably, there is another line of work that employs (personalized) probabilistic Markov embeddings to model sequential data like playlists and POIs (e.g. @cite_28 @cite_22 @cite_5 ). These works differ from ours in terms of both the signals being modeled and the types of models. Moreover, none of them has shown to be able to handle datasets on the same scale with to the best of our knowledge.