A Deep Generative Recommendation Method for Unbiased Learning from Implicit Feedback

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are the state-of-the-art model for recommendation with implicit feedback signals. Unfortunately, implicit feedback suffers from selection bias, e.g., popularity bias, position bias, etc., and as a result, training from such signals produces biased recommendation models. Existing methods for debiasing the learning process have not been applied in a generative setting. We address this gap by introducing an inverse propensity scoring (IPS) based method for training VAEs from implicit feedback data in an unbiased way. Our IPS-based estimator for the VAE training objective, VAE-IPS, is provably unbiased w.r.t. selection bias. Our experimental results show that the proposed VAE-IPS model reaches significantly higher performance than existing baselines. Our contributions enable practitioners to combine state-of-the-art VAE recommendation techniques with the advantages of bias mitigation for implicit feedback.