You are designing a deep-learning–based recommendation system that uses a Transformer-style cross-attention block to model the interaction between a user and a candidate item.
The model has these typical inputs:
-
A
user behavior sequence
: a list of items the user has interacted with in the past, each already embedded as a vector (e.g., size
d
).
-
A
candidate item
whose relevance score you want to predict, also embedded as a vector of size
d
.
-
Optional
context features
(time, device, location, etc.) that can also be embedded.
You decide to use a cross-attention layer somewhere in the model rather than only self-attention.
-
Propose a concrete way to define the
Query (Q)
,
Key (K)
, and
Value (V)
tensors in this cross-attention block using the inputs above. Explain what each of Q, K, and V represents semantically.
-
Give at least
two different reasonable design choices
for how to set up Q, K, and V (for example, one where the candidate item is the query and one where the user history is the query). For each design, explain:
-
What is used as Q, K, and V.
-
What interaction the attention mechanism is modeling.
-
Pros and cons or when that design is preferable.
-
Briefly explain how cross-attention here differs from self-attention within the user behavior sequence, and why cross-attention can be useful in recommendation systems.