Personalized Outfit Recommendation With Learnable Anchors

Zhi Lu, Yang Hu, Yan Chen, Bing Zeng; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 12722-12731

The multimedia community has recently seen a tremendous surge of interest in the fashion recommendation problem. A lot of efforts have been made to model the compatibility between fashion items. Some have also studied users' personal preferences for the outfits. There is, however, another difficulty in the task that hasn't been dealt with carefully by previous work. Users that are new to the system usually only have several (less than 5) outfits available for learning. With such a limited number of training examples, it is challenging to model the user's preferences reliably. In this work, we propose a new solution for personalized outfit recommendation that is capable of handling this case. We use a stacked self-attention mechanism to model the high-order interactions among the items. We then embed the items in an outfit into a single compact representation within the outfit space. To accommodate the variety of users' preferences, we characterize each user with a set of anchors, i.e. a group of learnable latent vectors in the outfit space that are the representatives of the outfits the user likes. We also learn a set of general anchors to model the general preference shared by all users. Based on this representation of the outfits and the users, we propose a simple but effective strategy for the new user profiling tasks. Extensive experiments on large scale real-world datasets demonstrate the performance of our proposed method.