Associate Professor Zhao Hongke: Rational or Emotional? Next-item Recommendations in Virtual Games via Disentangling Players' Needs

In a collaborative effort involving Associate Professor Zhao Hongke from Tianjin University's College of Management and Economics, Dr. Zhao Chuang, Researcher Wu Runze from NetEase Fuxi AI Lab, and Professor Yong Ge from the University of Arizona, USA, researchers have developed RERec, an innovative dual-motivation recommendation framework that successfully separates a player's dynamic, time-sensitive rational needs from their stable emotional needs. This research was completed.

Recently, the paper titled "Rational or Emotional? Next-item Recommendations in Virtual Games via Disentangling Players' Needs," authored by Associate Professor Zhao Hongke as the first author, was published online in the INFORMS Journal on Computing, a top international journal in the field of information systems and computing.

The study focuses on the cutting-edge issue of intelligent recommendation in virtual game scenarios. Methodologically, drawing on consumption motivation theory for the first time, the team deconstructed player purchasing behavior into two dimensions: rational needs and emotional needs. They innovatively designed a differentiated modeling framework called RERec, achieving a critical breakthrough from traditional unified preference modeling to fine-grained, motivation-aware recommendations, and systematically revealing the heterogeneous characteristics and dynamic evolution patterns of player needs in game scenarios. This achievement not only provides a new theoretical perspective and technical solution for recommendation systems in virtual games but also marks significant academic progress at the intersection of digital entertainment and artificial intelligence.

Author Biographies

Zhao Hongke: Yingcai Associate Professor, Specially Appointed Researcher, and Doctoral Supervisor at the College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University. He has published over 100 papers in top-tier journals and conferences including JOC, TKDE, TPAMI, TEVC, TOIS, Tourism Management, SIGKDD, and ICML. He was selected for the 2022 Baidu Scholar Global AI Young Chinese Scientist List (AI+X Intelligent Management). He has received the China Think Tank Index (CTTI) Annual Excellent Achievement Award (2019), the China Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI 2019) Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Nomination Award, the Runner-up Prize at ICML 2024 Challenges on Automated Math Reasoning, and the Third Prize at KDD-CUP 2019. His papers have been recognized as one of the "Top 10 Highly Cited Papers" in Journal of Computer Research and Development (2019), the Best Full Research Paper Runner-up at WSDM 2026, one of the Best-ranked Papers at WSDM 2022, "ESI Highly Cited Papers," and the Best Student Paper Award at the China Conference on Machine Learning (CCML 2019). He serves as Principal Investigator for a General Project and a Young Scientist Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, a special cooperation project in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Basic Research area, a major project of the Tianjin Municipal Education Commission's Social Science program, the Lenovo Scientist Program, and the CCF-Lenovo Blue Ocean Fund, as well as collaborations with several technology enterprises (such as Lenovo, Baidu, NetEase, among others) that yield significant social benefits.

For details, please visit: https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/ijoc.2025.1179

By College of Management and Economics

Editor: Sun Xiaofang