  Historical interactions are the default choice for recommender model
training, which typically exhibit high sparsity, i.e., most user-item pairs are
unobserved missing data. A standard choice is treating the missing data as
negative training samples and estimating interaction likelihood between
user-item pairs along with the observed interactions. In this way, some
potential interactions are inevitably mislabeled during training, which will
hurt the model fidelity, hindering the model to recall the mislabeled items,
especially the long-tail ones. In this work, we investigate the mislabeling
issue from a new perspective of aleatoric uncertainty, which describes the
inherent randomness of missing data. The randomness pushes us to go beyond
merely the interaction likelihood and embrace aleatoric uncertainty modeling.
Towards this end, we propose a new Aleatoric Uncertainty-aware Recommendation
(AUR) framework that consists of a new uncertainty estimator along with a
normal recommender model. According to the theory of aleatoric uncertainty, we
derive a new recommendation objective to learn the estimator. As the chance of
mislabeling reflects the potential of a pair, AUR makes recommendations
according to the uncertainty, which is demonstrated to improve the
recommendation performance of less popular items without sacrificing the
overall performance. We instantiate AUR on three representative recommender
models: Matrix Factorization (MF), LightGCN, and VAE from mainstream model
architectures. Extensive results on two real-world datasets validate the
effectiveness of AUR w.r.t. better recommendation results, especially on
long-tail items.
