CausalRec: Causal Inference for Visual Debiasing in Visually-Aware Recommendation

Understand

Visually-aware recommendation on E-commerce platforms aims to leverage visual information of items to predict a user's preference.

• It is commonly observed that user's attention to visual features does not always reflect the real preference.
• Although a user may click and view an item in light of a visual satisfaction of their expectations, a real purchase does not always occur due to the unsatisfaction of other essential features (e.g., brand, material, price).
• We refer to the reason for such a visually related interaction deviating from the real preference as a visual bias.