Dang, Yizhou
Towards Unified Modeling for Positive and Negative Preferences in Sign-Aware Recommendation
Liu, Yuting, Dang, Yizhou, Liang, Yuliang, Liu, Qiang, Guo, Guibing, Zhao, Jianzhe, Wang, Xingwei
Recently, sign-aware graph recommendation has drawn much attention as it will learn users' negative preferences besides positive ones from both positive and negative interactions (i.e., links in a graph) with items. To accommodate the different semantics of negative and positive links, existing works utilize two independent encoders to model users' positive and negative preferences, respectively. However, these approaches cannot learn the negative preferences from high-order heterogeneous interactions between users and items formed by multiple links with different signs, resulting in inaccurate and incomplete negative user preferences. To cope with these intractable issues, we propose a novel \textbf{L}ight \textbf{S}igned \textbf{G}raph Convolution Network specifically for \textbf{Rec}ommendation (\textbf{LSGRec}), which adopts a unified modeling approach to simultaneously model high-order users' positive and negative preferences on a signed user-item interaction graph. Specifically, for the negative preferences within high-order heterogeneous interactions, first-order negative preferences are captured by the negative links, while high-order negative preferences are propagated along positive edges. Then, recommendation results are generated based on positive preferences and optimized with negative ones. Finally, we train representations of users and items through different auxiliary tasks. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines regarding performance and computational efficiency. Our code is available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LSGRec-BB95}.
Uniform Sequence Better: Time Interval Aware Data Augmentation for Sequential Recommendation
Dang, Yizhou, Yang, Enneng, Guo, Guibing, Jiang, Linying, Wang, Xingwei, Xu, Xiaoxiao, Sun, Qinghui, Liu, Hong
Sequential recommendation is an important task to predict the next-item to access based on a sequence of interacted items. Most existing works learn user preference as the transition pattern from the previous item to the next one, ignoring the time interval between these two items. However, we observe that the time interval in a sequence may vary significantly different, and thus result in the ineffectiveness of user modeling due to the issue of \emph{preference drift}. In fact, we conducted an empirical study to validate this observation, and found that a sequence with uniformly distributed time interval (denoted as uniform sequence) is more beneficial for performance improvement than that with greatly varying time interval. Therefore, we propose to augment sequence data from the perspective of time interval, which is not studied in the literature. Specifically, we design five operators (Ti-Crop, Ti-Reorder, Ti-Mask, Ti-Substitute, Ti-Insert) to transform the original non-uniform sequence to uniform sequence with the consideration of variance of time intervals. Then, we devise a control strategy to execute data augmentation on item sequences in different lengths. Finally, we implement these improvements on a state-of-the-art model CoSeRec and validate our approach on four real datasets. The experimental results show that our approach reaches significantly better performance than the other 11 competing methods. Our implementation is available: https://github.com/KingGugu/TiCoSeRec.
ID Embedding as Subtle Features of Content and Structure for Multimodal Recommendation
Liu, Yuting, Yang, Enneng, Dang, Yizhou, Guo, Guibing, Liu, Qiang, Liang, Yuliang, Jiang, Linying, Wang, Xingwei
Multimodal recommendation aims to model user and item representations comprehensively with the involvement of multimedia content for effective recommendations. Existing research has shown that it is beneficial for recommendation performance to combine (user- and item-) ID embeddings with multimodal salient features, indicating the value of IDs. However, there is a lack of a thorough analysis of the ID embeddings in terms of feature semantics in the literature. In this paper, we revisit the value of ID embeddings for multimodal recommendation and conduct a thorough study regarding its semantics, which we recognize as subtle features of content and structures. Then, we propose a novel recommendation model by incorporating ID embeddings to enhance the semantic features of both content and structures. Specifically, we put forward a hierarchical attention mechanism to incorporate ID embeddings in modality fusing, coupled with contrastive learning, to enhance content representations. Meanwhile, we propose a lightweight graph convolutional network for each modality to amalgamate neighborhood and ID embeddings for improving structural representations. Finally, the content and structure representations are combined to form the ultimate item embedding for recommendation. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets (Baby, Sports, and Clothing) demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art multimodal recommendation methods and the effectiveness of fine-grained ID embeddings.