A Study on the Relative Importance of Convolutional Neural Networks in Visually-Aware Recommender Systems

Visually-aware recommender systems (VRSs) enhance the semantics of user-item interactions with visual features extracted from item images when they are available. Traditionally, VRSs leverage the representational power of pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to perform the item recommendation task. The adoption of CNNs is mainly attributed to their outstanding performance in representing visual data for supervised learning tasks, such as image classification. Their main drawback is that the learned representation of these networks is not entirely in line with the RS tasks - learning users' preferences.This work aims to provide a better understanding of the representation power of pretrained CNNs commonly adopted by the community when integrated with state-of-the-art VRSs algorithms. In particular, we evaluate the recommendation performance of a suite of VRSs using several pretrained CNNs as the image feature extractors on two datasets from a real-world e-commerce platform. Additionally, we propose a novel qualitative and quantitative evaluation paradigm to assess the visual diversity of recommended items compared to the interacted user's items.