  RNNs have been shown to be excellent models for sequential data and in
particular for data that is generated by users in an session-based manner. The
use of RNNs provides impressive performance benefits over classical methods in
session-based recommendations. In this work we introduce novel ranking loss
functions tailored to RNNs in the recommendation setting. The improved
performance of these losses over alternatives, along with further tricks and
refinements described in this work, allow for an overall improvement of up to
35% in terms of MRR and Recall@20 over previous session-based RNN solutions and
up to 53% over classical collaborative filtering approaches. Unlike data
augmentation-based improvements, our method does not increase training times
significantly. We further demonstrate the performance gain of the RNN over
baselines in an online A/B test.
