Cross-Domain Recommendation with Adversarial Examples

Cross-domain recommendation leverages the knowledge from relevant domains to alleviate the data sparsity issue. However, we find that the state-of-the-art cross-domain models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, leading to possibly large errors in generalization. That’s because most methods rarely consider the robustness of the proposed models. In this paper, we propose a new Adversarial Cross-Domain Network (ACDN), in which adversarial examples are dynamically generated to train the cross-domain recommendation model. Specifically, we first combine two multilayer perceptrons by sharing the user embedding matrix as our base model. Then, we add small but intentionally worst-case perturbations on the model embedding representations to construct adversarial examples, which can result in the model outputting an incorrect answer with a high confidence. By training with these aggressive examples, we are able to obtain a robust cross-domain model. Finally, we evaluate the proposed model on two large real-world datasets. Our experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on cross-domain recommendation.