BRUCE: Bundle Recommendation Using Contextualized item Embeddings

A bundle is a pre-defined set of items that are collected together. In many domains, bundling is one of the most important marketing strategies for item promotion, commonly used in e-commerce. Bundle recommendation resembles the item recommendation task, where bundles are the recommended unit, but it poses additional challenges; while item recommendation requires only user and item understanding, bundle recommendation also requires modeling the connections between the various items in a bundle. Transformers have driven the state-of-the-art methods for set and sequence modeling in various natural language processing and computer vision tasks, emphasizing the understanding that the neighbors of an element are of crucial importance. Under some required adjustments, we believe the same applies for items in bundles, and better capturing the relations of an item with other items in the bundle may lead to improved recommendations. To address that, we introduce BRUCE - a novel model for bundle recommendation, in which we adapt Transformers to represent data on users, items, and bundles. This allows exploiting the self-attention mechanism to model the following: latent relations between the items in a bundle; and users’ preferences toward each of the items in the bundle and toward the whole bundle. Moreover, we examine various architectures to integrate the items’ and the users’ information and provide insights on architecture selection based on data characteristics. Experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show that the proposed approach contributes to the accuracy of the recommendation and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods