How Do Recommendation Models Amplify Popularity Bias? An Analysis from the Spectral Perspective
Siyi Lin, Chongming Gao, Jiawei Chen, Sheng Zhou, Binbin Hu, Yan Feng, Chun Chen, Can Wang · 2025
Recommendation Systems (RS) are often plagued by popularity bias. When training a recommendation model on a typically long-tailed dataset, the model tends to not only inherit this bias but often exacerbate it, resulting in over-representation of popular items in the recommendation lists. This study conducts comprehensive empirical and theoretical analyses to expose the root causes of this phenomenon, yielding two core insights: 1) Item popularity is memorized in the principal spectrum of the score matrix predicted by the recommendation model; 2) The dimension reduction phenomenon amplifies the relative prominence of the principal spectrum, thereby intensifying the popularity bias.