Tootfinder

On Inherited Popularity Bias in Cold-Start Item Recommendation
Gregor Meehan, Johan Pauwels
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11402 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.114…

On Inherited Popularity Bias in Cold-Start Item Recommendation
Collaborative filtering (CF) recommender systems struggle with making predictions on unseen, or 'cold', items. Systems designed to address this challenge are often trained with supervision from warm CF models in order to leverage collaborative and content information from the available interaction data. However, since they learn to replicate the behavior of CF methods, cold-start models may therefore also learn to imitate their predictive biases. In this paper, we show that cold-start systems c…

Does Weighting Improve Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems?
Alex Ayoub, Samuel Robertson, Dawen Liang, Harald Steck, Nathan Kallus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10440 http…

Does Weighting Improve Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems?
Matrix factorization is a widely used approach for top-N recommendation and collaborative filtering. When implemented on implicit feedback data (such as clicks), a common heuristic is to upweight the observed interactions. This strategy has been shown to improve performance for certain algorithms. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of various weighting schemes and matrix factorization algorithms. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that training with unweighted data can perform comparably …

Leveraging Language Semantics for Collaborative Filtering with TextGCN and TextGCN-MLP: Zero-Shot vs In-Domain Performance
Andrei Chernov, Haroon Wahab, Oleg Novitskij
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12461 …

Leveraging Language Semantics for Collaborative Filtering with TextGCN and TextGCN-MLP: Zero-Shot vs In-Domain Performance
In recent years, various approaches have been proposed to leverage large language models (LLMs) for incorporating textual information about items into recommender systems. Existing methods primarily focus on either fine-tuning LLMs to generate recommendations or integrating LLM-based embeddings into downstream models. In this work, we follow the latter direction and propose \textbf{TextGCN}, which applies parameter-free graph convolution layers directly over LLM-based item-title embeddings, ins…