[HN Gopher] Music recommendation system using transformer models
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       Music recommendation system using transformer models
        
       Author : panarky
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2024-08-19 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (research.google)
 (TXT) w3m dump (research.google)
        
       | naltroc wrote:
       | when did google get a TLD
        
         | Zambyte wrote:
         | A decade ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.google
        
         | incognito124 wrote:
         | dns.google has been with us for a long time
        
           | warkdarrior wrote:
           | Shouldn't that be dns.squarespace now?
        
       | janalsncm wrote:
       | Other than stating there was one, they didn't show a benefit of
       | this over something like a Wide and Deep model, DCNv2 model, or
       | even a vanilla NN. Transformers make sense if you need to use
       | something N items ago as context (as in text) where N is large.
       | But in their example, any model which takes the last ~5 or so
       | interactions should be able to quickly understand contextual user
       | preferences.
       | 
       | A transformer may also be larger than their baseline, but you
       | still need to justify how those parameters are allocated.
        
       | disposition2 wrote:
       | It's interesting the amount of research listed in the article and
       | IMHO the recommendation engine/ algorithm used by Rdio in the
       | late aughts and early 2010s eclipses anything I've encountered to
       | date.
       | 
       | Seems like folks are reinventing the wheel, and trying to deduce
       | what folks want to engage in with data and "AI", rather than
       | providing sufficient tools to allow the user to drive the
       | narrative.
        
       | tulsidas wrote:
       | It's all very nice but if they end up "altering" the results
       | heavily to play you the music they want you to listen for X or Y
       | reason then it's pointless.
       | 
       | I would like to be able to run this model myself and have a
       | pristine and unbiased output of suggestions
        
         | vagabund wrote:
         | It may just be my perception, but I seem to have noticed this
         | steering becoming a lot more heavy handed on Spotify.
         | 
         | If I try to play any music from a historical genre, it's only
         | about 3 or 4 autoplays before it's queued exclusively
         | contemporary artists, usually performing a cheap pastiche of
         | the original style. It's honestly made the algorithm unusable,
         | to the point that I built a CLI tool that lets me get
         | recommendations from Claude conversationally, and adds them to
         | my queue via api. It's limited by Claude's relatively shallow
         | ability to retrieve from the vast library on these streaming
         | services, but it's still better than the alternative.
         | 
         | Hoping someone makes a model specifically for conversational
         | music DJing, it's really pretty magical when it's working well.
        
       | atum47 wrote:
       | All this research to create an apparently awesome recommendation
       | system only for the sales department forces the recommendation of
       | what they want to promote.
        
       | drdaeman wrote:
       | It doesn't seem that this approach "knows" the actual music. The
       | article doesn't seem to explain how track embedding vectors are
       | produced, but it mentions that user-action signals are of the
       | same length, which makes me doubt track embeddings have any
       | content-derived (rather than metadata-derived) information. Maybe
       | I'm wrong, of course.
       | 
       | I doubt that any recommendation system is capable of providing
       | meaningful results in absence of the "awareness" about the actual
       | content (be it music, books, movies or anything else) of what
       | it's meant to recommend.
       | 
       | It's like a deaf DJ that uses the charts data to decide what to
       | play, guessing and incorporating listeners' profiles/wishes. It's
       | better than a deaf DJ who just picks whatever's popular without
       | any context (or going by genre only), but it's not exactly what
       | one looks forward to when looking for a recommendation.
        
       | dr0p wrote:
       | why ? Why wasting resources and energy on something that no one
       | needs. The because we can mentality is what will break this
       | bubble.
        
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