Pseudo Label NCF for Sparse OHC Recommendation: Dual Representation Learning and the Separability Accuracy Trade off

Implicit feedback is widely used in recommender systems due to its accessibility and generality, yet it usually presents noisy samples (e.g., clickbait, position bias). Meanwhile, recommenders inevitably face the item cold-start problem due to the continuous influx of new items. We identify that cold items are more prone to noisy samples due to the aforementioned factors, and researchers often overlook the significance of denoising implicit feedback for cold items. Previous denoising studies usually identify noisy samples based on heuristic patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigate noise through sample selection or re-weighting. However, these methods have limited adaptability and are ineffective in cold-start scenarios. To achieve denoising implicit feedback for cold-start recommendation, we propose a model-agnostic denoising method called DIF. First, user preferences for content remain stable, which allows us to infer pseudo-labels indicating whether a user is interested in a cold item through content-similar warm items. Furthermore, to improve pseudo-label accuracy, we model the confidence of pseudo-labels based on the content similarity between the cold item and warm items, and then aggregate multiple pseudo-labels for each sample. Finally, we explicitly estimate the uncertainty of the noisy sample label by considering its relative entropy and the cold-start status of the item, which adaptively guides the role of pseudo-labels to correct the noisy labels at the sample level. DIF's superiority is supported by both theoretical justification and extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The method has been deployed on a billion-user scale short video application Kuaishou and has significantly improved various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.

Algorithmic news personalization in regional markets often fails because modern deep learning models require massive interaction data while real-world news has a short Time-to-Live (TTL < 48 h) and shallow article pools. This structural item cold-start deprives collaborative filtering of the data needed for robust modeling. This paper presents Project Kairos, a framework that bridges this data scarcity through a contextual online learning approach (LinUCB). To ensure numerical integrity for continuous operation, Kairos replaces error-prone Sherman-Morrison inversions with direct rank-1 updates of Cholesky factors. This preserves the positive definiteness of the covariance matrix even under ill-conditioned data scenarios. Simultaneously, Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) integration addresses inference latency. Empirical evaluations based on the Tagesschau API demonstrate that exploiting semantic redundancy in the feature space achieves a 4.85-fold efficiency gain without significantly compromising ranking precision. Kairos thus provides a blueprint for high-performance recommendation systems in resource- and data-constrained environments.

Real-world recommendation platforms routinely collect explicit negative feedback such as 1-star reviews, hate-button clicks, distrust between users, and very-low watch-ratio videos. Learned sign-aware recommenders exploit this signal for clear accuracy gains, but only at the cost of gradient-based training. In parallel, a line of training-free spectral collaborative filtering methods matches or beats learned graph recommenders at a fraction of the cost, yet operates on positive interactions alone. We bridge these two lines with DualSpectralCF, a training-free framework of two components that attach to any spectral backbone of the form $\hat{\mathbf{r}}_u = F(\mathbf{M}) \mathbf{r}_u$: a signed input signal $\mathbf{r}_u^{\pm}$ that encodes the user's explicit dislikes, and a signed item-item operator $\mathbf{M}^{\pm}$ that blends like-together and dislike-together similarity. The framework is backbone-agnostic and adds just two scalar hyperparameters. We instantiate DualSpectralCF on ChebyCF, GF-CF, and Turbo-CF, and evaluate on five sign-aware benchmarks: every instance matches or beats its unsigned backbone on all 5 datasets, with Recall@20 lifts up to +32.6% with backbone-specific $(γ, κ)$ tuning and +1.9% to +16.0% for DualSpectralCF-Cheby at the fixed default $(γ= -0.5, κ= 0.1)$, and the family runs 7.7 to 155.3$\times$ faster than SIGformer while reaching 70.7% to 90.7% of its accuracy. Sign-awareness helps most for cold-start users, with up to +29.2% Recall@20 on Epinions users with 1 to 5 training items.