  Most existing recommender systems represent a user's preference with a
feature vector, which is assumed to be fixed when predicting this user's
preferences for different items. However, the same vector cannot accurately
capture a user's varying preferences on all items, especially when considering
the diverse characteristics of various items. To tackle this problem, in this
paper, we propose a novel Multimodal Attentive Metric Learning (MAML) method to
model user diverse preferences for various items. In particular, for each
user-item pair, we propose an attention neural network, which exploits the
item's multimodal features to estimate the user's special attention to
different aspects of this item. The obtained attention is then integrated into
a metric-based learning method to predict the user preference on this item. The
advantage of metric learning is that it can naturally overcome the problem of
dot product similarity, which is adopted by matrix factorization (MF) based
recommendation models but does not satisfy the triangle inequality property. In
addition, it is worth mentioning that the attention mechanism cannot only help
model user's diverse preferences towards different items, but also overcome the
geometrically restrictive problem caused by collaborative metric learning.
Extensive experiments on large-scale real-world datasets show that our model
can substantially outperform the state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating the
potential of modeling user diverse preference for recommendation.
