Abstract: As a tool to alleviate “information overload”, recommendation system provides personalized recommendation services for users to filter redundant information, and has been widely used in recent years. However, in actual recommendation scenarios, there are often issues such as cold start and difficulty in adaptively selecting different recommendation algorithms based on the actual environment. Meta-learning, which has the advantage of quickly learning new knowledge and skills from a small number of training samples, is increasingly being applied in research related to recommendation systems. This paper discusses the main research on using meta-learning techniques to alleviate cold start problems and adaptive recommendation issues in recommendation systems. Firstly, it analyzes the relevant research progress made in meta-learning-based recommendations in these two areas. Then, it points out the challenges faced by existing meta-learning recommendation research, such as difficulty in adapting to complex task distributions, high computational costs, and a tendency to fall into local optima. Finally, it provides an outlook on some of the latest research directions in meta-learning for recommendation systems.

Key words: meta-learning, personalized recommendation, cold start, self-adaptive algorithm selection