Paper · arXiv 2411.16034
VisualLens: Personalization through Visual History
Wang Bill Zhu, Deqing Fu, Kai Sun, Yi Lu, Zhaojiang Lin, Seungwhan Moon, Kanika Narang, Mustafa Canim, Yue Liu, Anuj Kumar, Xin Luna Dong
VisualLens extracts, filters, and refines image representations from users' visual histories to enhance personalization, outperforming existing methods and GPT-4o in recommendation tasks.
Abstract
We hypothesize that a user's visual history with images reflecting their daily life, offers valuable insights into their interests and preferences, and can be leveraged for personalization. Among the many challenges to achieve this goal, the foremost is the diversity and noises in the visual history, containing images not necessarily related to a recommendation task, not necessarily reflecting the user's interest, or even not necessarily preference-relevant. Existing recommendation systems either rely on task-specific user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. We propose a novel approach, VisualLens, that extracts, filters, and refines image representations, and leverages these signals for personalization. We created two new benchmarks with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that our method improves over state-of-the-art recommendations by 5-10% on Hit@3, and improves over GPT-4o by 2-5%. Our approach paves the way for personalized recommendations in scenarios where traditional methods fail.