Content-Aware Few-Shot Meta-Learning for Cold-Start Recommendation on Portable Sensing Devices

Abstract

The cold-start problem in sequence recommendations presents a critical and challenging issue for portable sensing devices. Existing content-aware approaches often struggle to effectively distinguish the relative importance of content features and typically lack generalizability when processing new data. To address these limitations, we propose a content-aware few-shot meta-learning (CFSM) model to enhance the accuracy of cold-start sequence recommendations. Our model incorporates a double-tower network (DT-Net) that learns user and item representations through a meta-encoder and a mutual attention encoder, effectively mitigating the impact of noisy data on auxiliary information. By framing the cold-start problem as few-shot meta-learning, we employ a model-agnostic meta-optimization strategy to train the model across a variety of tasks during the meta-learning phase. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets—ShortVideos, MovieLens, and Book-Crossing—demonstrate the superiority of our model in cold-start recommendation scenarios. Compared to MetaCs-DNN, the second-best approach, CFSM, achieves improvements of 1.55%, 1.34%, and 2.42% under the AUC metric on the three datasets, respectively.