  This paper proposes a new neural architecture for collaborative ranking with
implicit feedback. Our model, LRML (\textit{Latent Relational Metric Learning})
is a novel metric learning approach for recommendation. More specifically,
instead of simple push-pull mechanisms between user and item pairs, we propose
to learn latent relations that describe each user item interaction. This helps
to alleviate the potential geometric inflexibility of existing metric learing
approaches. This enables not only better performance but also a greater extent
of modeling capability, allowing our model to scale to a larger number of
interactions. In order to do so, we employ a augmented memory module and learn
to attend over these memory blocks to construct latent relations. The
memory-based attention module is controlled by the user-item interaction,
making the learned relation vector specific to each user-item pair. Hence, this
can be interpreted as learning an exclusive and optimal relational translation
for each user-item interaction. The proposed architecture demonstrates the
state-of-the-art performance across multiple recommendation benchmarks. LRML
outperforms other metric learning models by $6\%-7.5\%$ in terms of Hits@10 and
nDCG@10 on large datasets such as Netflix and MovieLens20M. Moreover,
qualitative studies also demonstrate evidence that our proposed model is able
to infer and encode explicit sentiment, temporal and attribute information
despite being only trained on implicit feedback. As such, this ascertains the
ability of LRML to uncover hidden relational structure within implicit
datasets.
