Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently enabled a popular class of algorithms for collaborative filtering (CF). Nevertheless, the theoretical underpinnings of their empirical successes remain elusive. In this paper, we endeavor to obtain a better understanding of GCN-based CF methods via the lens of graph signal processing. By identifying the critical role of smoothness, a key concept in graph signal processing, we develop a unified graph convolution-based framework for CF. We prove that many existing CF methods are special cases of this framework, including the neighborhood-based methods, low-rank matrix factorization, linear auto-encoders, and LightGCN, corresponding to different low-pass filters. Based on our framework, we then present a simple and computationally efficient CF baseline, which we shall refer to as Graph Filter based Collaborative Filtering (GF-CF). Given an implicit feedback matrix, GF-CF can be obtained in a closed form instead of expensive training with back-propagation. Experiments will show that GF-CF achieves competitive or better performance against deep learning-based methods on three well-known datasets, notably with a $70\%$ performance gain over LightGCN on the Amazon-book dataset.
China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；East China Jiaotong University（华东交通大学）；Federation University Australia（澳大利亚联邦大学）
Sparsity of user-to-item rating data becomes one of challenging issues in the recommender systems, which severely deteriorates the recommendation performance. Fortunately, context-aware recommender systems can alleviate the sparsity problem by making use of some auxiliary information, such as the information of both the users and items. In particular, the visual information of items, such as the movie poster, can be considered as the supplement for item description documents, which helps to obtain more item features. In this paper, we focus on movie recommender system and propose a probabilist…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
Herb recommendation plays a crucial role in the therapeutic process of Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM), which aims to recommend a set of herbs to treat the symptoms of a patient. While several machine learning methods have been developed for herb recommendation, they are limited in modeling only the interactions between herbs and symptoms, and ignoring the intermediate process of syndrome induction. When performing TCM diagnostics, an experienced doctor typically induces syndromes from the patient's symptoms and then suggests herbs based on the induced syndromes. As such, we believe the indu…
In many recommender systems, users and items are associated with attributes, and users show preferences to items. The attribute information describes users'(items') characteristics and has a wide range of applications, such as user profiling, item annotation, and feature-enhanced recommendation. As annotating user (item) attributes is a labor intensive task, the attribute values are often incomplete with many missing attribute values. Therefore, item recommendation and attribute inference have become two main tasks in these platforms. Researchers have long converged that user (item) attributes…
Quaternion-Based Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation
Soochow University（苏州大学）；Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Texas Tech University（德克萨斯理工大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Stony Brook University（石溪大学）；The Institute of Cancer Research（英国癌症研究院）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）；Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局（A*STAR）新加坡制造技术研究院（SIMTech））
Representation learning-based recommendation models play a dominant role among recommendation techniques. However, most of the existing methods assume both historical interactions and embedding dimensions are independent of each other, and thus regrettably ignore the high-order interaction information among historical interactions and embedding dimensions. In this paper, we propose a novel representation learning-based model called COMET (COnvolutional diMEnsion inTeraction), which simultaneously models the high-order interaction patterns among historical interactions and embedding dimensions.…
We consider the problem of learning latent features (aka embedding) for users and items in a recommendation setting. Given only a user-item interaction graph, the goal is to recommend items for each user. Traditional approaches employ matrix factorization-based collaborative filtering methods. Recent methods using graph convolutional networks (e.g., LightGCN) achieve state-of-the-art performance. They learn both user and item embedding. One major drawback of most existing methods is that they are not inductive; they do not generalize for users and items unseen during training. Besides, existin…
China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；Minjiang University（闽江学院）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Federation University Australia（澳大利亚联邦大学）
The rapid growth of edge data generated by mobile devices and applications deployed at the edge of the network has exacerbated the problem of information overload. As an effective way to alleviate information overload, recommender system can improve the quality of various services by adding application data generated by users on edge devices, such as visual and textual information, on the basis of sparse rating data. The visual information in the movie trailer is a significant part of the movie recommender system. However, due to the complexity of visual information extraction, data sparsity c…
\textbf{G}raph \textbf{C}onvolutional \textbf{N}etwork (\textbf{GCN}) is widely used in graph data learning tasks such as recommendation. However, when facing a large graph, the graph convolution is very computationally expensive thus is simplified in all existing GCNs, yet is seriously impaired due to the oversimplification. To address this gap, we leverage the \textit{original graph convolution} in GCN and propose a \textbf{L}ow-pass \textbf{C}ollaborative \textbf{F}ilter (\textbf{LCF}) to make it applicable to the large graph. LCF is designed to remove the noise caused by exposure and quant…
Sequential Recommendation is a prominent topic in current research, which uses user behavior sequence as an input to predict future behavior. By assessing the correlation strength of historical behavior through the dot product, the model based on the self-attention mechanism can capture the long-term preference of the sequence. However, it has two limitations. On the one hand, it does not effectively utilize the items' local context information when determining the attention and creating the sequence representation. On the other hand, the convolution and linear layers often contain redundant i…
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist)（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Bundle recommendation aims to recommend a bundle of items for a user to consume as a whole. Existing solutions integrate user-item interaction modeling into bundle recommendation by sharing model parameters or learning in a multi-task manner, which cannot explicitly model the affiliation between items and bundles, and fail to explore the decision-making when a user chooses bundles. In this work, we propose a graph neural network model named BGCN (short for \textit{\textBF{B}undle \textBF{G}raph \textBF{C}onvolutional \textBF{N}etwork}) for bundle recommendation. BGCN unifies user-item interact…
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) have been recently employed as core component in the construction of recommender system algorithms, interpreting user-item interactions as the edges of a bipartite graph. However, in the absence of side information, the majority of existing models adopt an approach of randomly initialising the user embeddings and optimising them throughout the training process. This strategy makes these algorithms inherently transductive, curtailing their ability to generate predictions for users that were unseen at training time. To address this issue, we propose a convoluti…
Recently, Graph Convolution Network (GCN) based methods have achieved outstanding performance for recommendation. These methods embed users and items in Euclidean space, and perform graph convolution on user-item interaction graphs. However, real-world datasets usually exhibit tree-like hierarchical structures, which make Euclidean space less effective in capturing user-item relationship. In contrast, hyperbolic space, as a continuous analogue of a tree-graph, provides a promising alternative. In this paper, we propose a fully hyperbolic GCN model for recommendation, where all operations are p…
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Beijing Institute of Remote Sensing（北京遥感信息研究所）；School of Computer Science, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机学院）；Department of Computer Science, Stanford University（斯坦福大学计算机科学系）；Chinese Academy of Engineering（中国工程院）
Most of the existing deep learning-based sequential recommendation approaches utilize the recurrent neural network architecture or self-attention to model the sequential patterns and temporal influence among a user's historical behavior and learn the user's preference at a specific time. However, these methods have two main drawbacks. First, they focus on modeling users' dynamic states from a user-centric perspective and always neglect the dynamics of items over time. Second, most of them deal with only the first-order user-item interactions and do not consider the high-order connectivity betw…
Rakuten Institute of Technology, Rakuten Group, Inc.（乐天集团乐天技术研究所）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Leveraging graphs on recommender systems has gained popularity with the development of graph representation learning (GRL). In particular, knowledge graph embedding (KGE) and graph neural networks (GNNs) are representative GRL approaches, which have achieved the state-of-the-art performance on several recommendation tasks. Furthermore, combination of KGE and GNNs (KG-GNNs) has been explored and found effective in many academic literatures. One of the main characteristics of GNNs is their ability to retain structural properties among neighbors in the resulting dense representation, which is usu…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Beijing Kuaishou Technology Co., Ltd.（北京快手科技有限公司）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
Graph Convolution Network (GCN) has become new state-of-the-art for collaborative filtering. Nevertheless, the reasons of its effectiveness for recommendation are not well understood. Existing work that adapts GCN to recommendation lacks thorough ablation analyses on GCN, which is originally designed for graph classification tasks and equipped with many neural network operations. However, we empirically find that the two most common designs in GCNs -- feature transformation and nonlinear activation -- contribute little to the performance of collaborative filtering. Even worse, including them a…
Graph Representation Learning (GRL) is an upcoming and promising area in recommendation systems. In this paper, we revisit the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of adjacency matrix for embedding generation of users and items and use a two-layer neural network on top of these embeddings to learn relevance between user-item pairs. Inspired by the success of higher-order learning in GRL, we further propose an extension of this method to include two-hop neighbors for SVD through the second order of the adjacency matrix and demonstrate improved performance compared with the simple SVD method which…
Recent advancements in deep neural networks for graph-structured data have led to state-of-the-art performance on recommender system benchmarks. In this work, we present a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) algorithm SWAG (Sample Weight and AGgregate), which combines efficient random walks and graph convolutions on weighted graphs to generate embeddings for nodes (items) that incorporate both graph structure as well as node feature information such as item-descriptions and item-images. The three important SWAG operations that enable us to efficiently generate node embeddings based on graph stru…
These years much effort has been devoted to improving the accuracy or relevance of the recommendation system. Diversity, a crucial factor which measures the dissimilarity among the recommended items, received rather little scrutiny. Directly related to user satisfaction, diversification is usually taken into consideration after generating the candidate items. However, this decoupled design of diversification and candidate generation makes the whole system suboptimal. In this paper, we aim at pushing the diversification to the upstream candidate generation stage, with the help of Graph Convolut…
Bundle recommendation is an emerging research direction in the recommender system with the focus on recommending customized bundles of items for users. Although Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been applied in this problem and achieve superior performance, existing methods underexplore the graph-level GNN methods, which exhibit great potential in traditional recommender system. Furthermore, they usually lack the transferability from one domain with sufficient supervision to another domain which might suffer from the label scarcity issue. In this work, we propose a subgraph-based Graph Neural …
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and their variants have achieved significant performances on various recommendation tasks. However, many existing GCN models tend to perform recursive aggregations among all related nodes, which can arise severe computational burden to hinder their application to large-scale recommendation tasks. To this end, this paper proposes the flattened GCN~(FlatGCN) model, which is able to achieve superior performance with remarkably less complexity compared with existing models. Our main contribution is three-fold. First, we propose a simplified but powerful GCN arch…
Lightweight yet Fine-grained: A Graph Capsule Convolutional Network with Subspace Alignment for Shared-account Sequential Recommendation
College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学计算机科学与技术学院）
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully adopted in recommender systems by virtue of the message-passing that implicitly captures collaborative effect. Nevertheless, most of the existing message-passing mechanisms for recommendation are directly inherited from GNNs without scrutinizing whether the captured collaborative effect would benefit the prediction of user preferences. In this paper, we first analyze how message-passing captures the collaborative effect and propose a recommendation-oriented topological metric, Common Interacted Ratio (CIR), which measures the level of interac…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
To alleviate data sparsity and cold-start problems of traditional recommender systems (RSs), incorporating knowledge graphs (KGs) to supplement auxiliary information has attracted considerable attention recently. However, simply integrating KGs in current KG-based RS models is not necessarily a guarantee to improve the recommendation performance, which may even weaken the holistic model capability. This is because the construction of these KGs is independent of the collection of historical user-item interactions; hence, information in these KGs may not always be helpful for recommendation to a…
Recommendation models utilizing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance, as they can integrate both the node information and the topological structure of the user-item interaction graph. However, these GCN-based recommendation models not only suffer from over-smoothing when stacking too many layers but also bear performance degeneration resulting from the existence of noise in user-item interactions. In this paper, we first identify a recommendation dilemma of over-smoothing and solution collapsing in current GCN-based models. Specifically, these models u…
Multi-behavior recommendation, which exploits auxiliary behaviors (e.g., click and cart) to help predict users' potential interactions on the target behavior (e.g., buy), is regarded as an effective way to alleviate the data sparsity or cold-start issues in recommendation. Multi-behaviors are often taken in certain orders in real-world applications (e.g., click>cart>buy). In a behavior chain, a latter behavior usually exhibits a stronger signal of user preference than the former one does. Most existing multi-behavior models fail to capture such dependencies in a behavior chain for embedding le…
Using reviews to learn user and item representations is important for recommender system. Current review based methods can be divided into two categories: (1) the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based models that extract n-gram features from user/item reviews; (2) the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based models that learn global contextual representations from reviews for users and items. Despite their success, both CNN and RNN based models in previous studies suffer from their own drawbacks. While CNN based models are weak in modeling long-dependency relation in text, RNN based models are sl…
With the tremendous growth in the number of scientific papers being published, searching for references while writing a scientific paper is a time-consuming process. A technique that could add a reference citation at the appropriate place in a sentence will be beneficial. In this perspective, context-aware citation recommendation has been researched upon for around two decades. Many researchers have utilized the text data called the context sentence, which surrounds the citation tag, and the metadata of the target paper to find the appropriate cited research. However, the lack of well-organize…
Personalized recommender systems have been widely studied and deployed to reduce information overload and satisfy users' diverse needs. However, conventional recommendation models solely conduct a one-time training-test fashion and can hardly adapt to evolving demands, considering user preference shifts and ever-increasing users and items in the real world. To tackle such challenges, the streaming recommendation is proposed and has attracted great attention recently. Among these, continual graph learning is widely regarded as a promising approach for the streaming recommendation by academia an…
With the tremendous success of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), they have been widely applied to recommender systems and have shown promising performance. However, most GCN-based methods rigorously stick to a common GCN learning paradigm and suffer from two limitations: (1) the limited scalability due to the high computational cost and slow training convergence; (2) the notorious over-smoothing issue which reduces performance as stacking graph convolution layers. We argue that the above limitations are due to the lack of a deep understanding of GCN-based methods. To this end, we first inve…
University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Airbnb, Inc（爱彼迎公司）；UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Walmart Labs（沃尔玛实验室）
Within-basket recommendation reduces the exploration time of users, where the user's intention of the basket matters. The intent of a shopping basket can be retrieved from both user-item collaborative filtering signals and multi-item correlations. By defining a basket entity to represent the basket intent, we can model this problem as a basket-item link prediction task in the User-Basket-Item~(UBI) graph. Previous work solves the problem by leveraging user-item interactions and item-item interactions simultaneously. However, collectivity and heterogeneity characteristics are hardly investigate…
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most successful approaches for recommender systems. With the emergence of online social networks, social recommendation has become a popular research direction. Most of these social recommendation models utilized each user's local neighbors' preferences to alleviate the data sparsity issue in CF. However, they only considered the local neighbors of each user and neglected the process that users' preferences are influenced as information diffuses in the social network. Recently, Graph Convolutional Networks~(GCN) have shown promising results by modelin…
The remarkable progress of network embedding has led to state-of-the-art algorithms in recommendation. However, the sparsity of user-item interactions (i.e., explicit preferences) on websites remains a big challenge for predicting users' behaviors. Although research efforts have been made in utilizing some auxiliary information (e.g., social relations between users) to solve the problem, the existing rich heterogeneous auxiliary relationships are still not fully exploited. Moreover, previous works relied on linearly combined regularizers and suffered parameter tuning. In this work, we collect …
Yanshan University（燕山大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Massive open online courses are becoming a modish way for education, which provides a large-scale and open-access learning opportunity for students to grasp the knowledge. To attract students' interest, the recommendation system is applied by MOOCs providers to recommend courses to students. However, as a course usually consists of a number of video lectures, with each one covering some specific knowledge concepts, directly recommending courses overlook students'interest to some specific knowledge concepts. To fill this gap, in this paper, we study the problem of knowledge concept recommendati…
Session-based recommendation (SBR) focuses on next-item prediction at a certain time point. As user profiles are generally not available in this scenario, capturing the user intent lying in the item transitions plays a pivotal role. Recent graph neural networks (GNNs) based SBR methods regard the item transitions as pairwise relations, which neglect the complex high-order information among items. Hypergraph provides a natural way to capture beyond-pairwise relations, while its potential for SBR has remained unexplored. In this paper, we fill this gap by modeling session-based data as a hypergr…
Using graph models with relational information in recommender systems has shown promising results. Yet, most methods are transductive, i.e., they are based on dimensionality reduction architectures. Hence, they require heavy retraining every time new items or users are added. Conversely, inductive methods promise to solve these issues. Nonetheless, all inductive methods rely only on interactions, making recommendations for users with few interactions sub-optimal and even impossible for new items. Therefore, we focus on inductive methods able to also exploit knowledge graphs (KGs). In this work…
An efficient solution to the large-scale recommender system is to represent users and items as binary hash codes in the Hamming space. Towards this end, existing methods tend to code users by modeling their Hamming similarities with the items they historically interact with, which are termed as the first-order similarities in this work. Despite their efficiency, these methods suffer from the suboptimal representative capacity, since they forgo the correlation established by connecting multiple first-order similarities, i.e., the relation among the indirect instances, which could be defined as …
Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) manifest great potential in recommendation. This is attributed to their capability on learning good user and item embeddings by exploiting the collaborative signals from the high-order neighbors. Like other GCN models, the GCN based recommendation models also suffer from the notorious over-smoothing problem - when stacking more layers, node embeddings become more similar and eventually indistinguishable, resulted in performance degradation. The recently proposed LightGCN and LR-GCN alleviate this problem to some extent, however, we argue that they overlook an …
Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential recommendation (SCSR) is the task of recommending the next item based on a sequence of recorded user behaviors, where multiple users share a single account, and their behaviours are available in multiple domains. Existing work on solving SCSR mainly relies on mining sequential patterns via RNN-based models, which are not expressive enough to capture the relationships among multiple entities. Moreover, all existing algorithms try to bridge two domains via knowledge transfer in the latent space, and the explicit cross-domain graph structure is unexploited. …
Reorganizing implicit feedback of users as a user-item interaction graph facilitates the applications of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) in recommendation tasks. In the interaction graph, edges between user and item nodes function as the main element of GCNs to perform information propagation and generate informative representations. Nevertheless, an underlying challenge lies in the quality of interaction graph, since observed interactions with less-interested items occur in implicit feedback (say, a user views micro-videos accidentally). This means that the neighborhoods involved with suc…
