Accurate bundle matching and generation via multitask learning with partially shared parameters

How can we recommend existing bundles to users accurately? How can we generate new tailored bundles for users? Recommending a bundle, or a group of various items, has attracted widespread attention in e-commerce owing to the increased satisfaction of both users and providers. Bundle matching and bundle generation are two representative tasks in bundle recommendation. The bundle matching task is to correctly match existing bundles to users while the bundle generation is to generate new bundles that users would prefer. Although many recent works have developed bundle recommendation models, they fail to achieve high accuracy since they do not handle heterogeneous data effectively and do not learn a method for customized bundle generation. In this paper, we propose BundleMage, an accurate approach for bundle matching and generation. BundleMage effectively mixes user preferences of items and bundles using an adaptive gate technique to achieve high accuracy for the bundle matching. BundleMage also generates a personalized bundle by learning a generation module that exploits a user preference and the characteristic of a given incomplete bundle to be completed. BundleMage further improves its performance using multi-task learning with partially shared parameters. Through extensive experiments, we show that BundleMage achieves up to 6.6% higher nDCG in bundle matching and 6.3× higher nDCG in bundle generation than the best competitors. We also provide qualitative analysis that BundleMage effectively generates bundles considering both the tastes of users and the characteristics of target bundles.