Bi-NAS: Towards Effective and Personalized Explanation for Recommender Systems via Bi-Level Neural Architecture Search

Longfeng Wu, Yao Zhou, Tong Zeng, Zhimin Peng, Bhanu Pratap Singh Rawat, Lecheng Zheng, Giovanni Seni, Dawei Zhou

Recommender systems are vital in helping users navigate vast amounts of information, offering personalized suggestions and effective explanations for these recommendations. While previous efforts have attempted to provide such explanations, evaluating their effectiveness across various scenarios remains a challenge. Enhancing these explanations is essential for improving user engagement, trust, and decision-making. To facilitate effective explanations within the recommender system, we propose a Bi-level Neural Architecture Search (Bi-NAS) framework to optimize explanations. This approach simultaneously refines cross-attention mechanisms and feature interaction functions by exploring both intra-layer and inter-layer design spaces. Furthermore, we integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance explanation generation, leveraging zero-shot prompting to produce more effective and personalized justifications. By aligning user feature preferences with item quality scores, our approach ensures that explanations reflect both user intent and item attributes, improving transparency and reasoning depth. Extensive evaluations on four real-world datasets demonstrate that Bi-NAS not only boosts recommendation accuracy but also significantly improves the effectiveness of explanations for recommender systems, providing users with clear and reliable insights into the suggestions they receive.