AutoML for Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey

• Published in: ACM transactions on information systems 2023-03, Vol.41 (4), p.1-38, Article 101
• Main Authors: Zheng, Ruiqi, Qu, Liang, Cui, Bin, Shi, Yuhui, Yin, Hongzhi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Information systems; Recommender systems
• ISSN: 1046-8188; 1558-2868
• DOI: 10.1145/3579355

Recommender systems play a significant role in information filtering and have been utilized in different scenarios, such as e-commerce and social media. With the prosperity of deep learning, deep recommender systems show superior performance by capturing non-linear information and item-user relationships. However, the design of deep recommender systems heavily relies on human experiences and expert knowledge. To tackle this problem, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is introduced to automatically search for the proper candidates for different parts of deep recommender systems. This survey performs a comprehensive review of the literature in this field. First, we propose an abstract concept for AutoML for deep recommender systems (AutoRecSys) that describes its building blocks and distinguishes it from conventional AutoML techniques and recommender systems. Second, we present a taxonomy as a classification framework containing feature selection search, embedding dimension search, feature interaction search, model architecture search, and other components search. Furthermore, we put a particular emphasis on the search space and search strategy, as they are the common thread to connect all methods within each category and enable practitioners to analyze and compare various approaches. Finally, we propose four future promising research directions that will lead this line of research.