Improving Knowledge-aware Recommendation with Multi-level Interactive Contrastive Learning

Incorporating Knowledge Graphs (KG) into recommeder system has attracted considerable attention. Recently, the technical trend of Knowledge-aware Recommendation (KGR) is to develop end-to-end models based on graph neural networks (GNNs). However, the extremely sparse user-item interactions significantly degrade the performance of the GNN-based models, as: 1) the sparse interaction, means inadequate supervision signals and limits the supervised GNN-based models; 2) the combination of sparse interactions (CF part) and redundant KG facts (KG part) results in an unbalanced information utilization. Besides, the GNN paradigm aggregates local neighbors for node representation learning, while ignoring the non-local KG facts and making the knowledge extraction insufficient. Inspired by the recent success of contrastive learning in mining supervised signals from data itself, in this paper, we focus on exploring contrastive learning in KGR and propose a novel multi-level interactive contrastive learning mechanism. Different from traditional contrastive learning methods which contrast nodes of two generated graph views, interactive contrastive mechanism conducts layer-wise self-supervised learning by contrasting layers of different parts within graphs, which is also an "interaction" action. Specifically, we first construct local and non-local graphs for user/item in KG, exploring more KG facts for KGR. Then an intra-graph level interactive contrastive learning is performed within each graph, which contrasts layers of the CF and KG parts, for more consistent information leveraging. Besides, an inter-graph level interactive contrastive learning is performed between the local and non-local graphs, for sufficiently and coherently extracting non-local KG signals. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show the superior performance of our proposed method over the state-of-the-arts.

Multi-level Cross-view Contrastive Learning for Knowledge-aware Recommender System

Knowledge graph (KG) plays an increasingly important role in recommender systems. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) based model has gradually become the theme of knowledge-aware recommendation (KGR). However, there is a natural deficiency for GNN-based KGR models, that is, the sparse supervised signal problem, which may make their actual performance drop to some extent. Inspired by the recent success of contrastive learning in mining supervised signals from data itself, in this paper, we focus on exploring the contrastive learning in KG-aware recommendation and propose a novel multi-level cross-view contrastive learning mechanism, named MCCLK. Different from traditional contrastive learning methods which generate two graph views by uniform data augmentation schemes such as corruption or dropping, we comprehensively consider three different graph views for KG-aware recommendation, including global-level structural view, local-level collaborative and semantic views. Specifically, we consider the user-item graph as a collaborative view, the item-entity graph as a semantic view, and the user-item-entity graph as a structural view. MCCLK hence performs contrastive learning across three views on both local and global levels, mining comprehensive graph feature and structure information in a self-supervised manner. Besides, in semantic view, a k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) item-item semantic graph construction module is proposed, to capture the important item-item semantic relation which is usually ignored by previous work. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show the superior performance of our proposed method over the state-of-the-arts. The implementations are available at: https://github.com/CCIIPLab/MCCLK.

Multi-view Intent Disentangle Graph Networks for Bundle Recommendation

Bundle recommendation aims to recommend the user a bundle of items as a whole. Nevertheless, they usually neglect the diversity of the user's intents on adopting items and fail to disentangle the user's intents in representations. In the real scenario of bundle recommendation, a user's intent may be naturally distributed in the different bundles of that user (Global view), while a bundle may contain multiple intents of a user (Local view). Each view has its advantages for intent disentangling: 1) From the global view, more items are involved to present each intent, which can demonstrate the user's preference under each intent more clearly. 2) From the local view, it can reveal the association among items under each intent since items within the same bundle are highly correlated to each other. To this end, we propose a novel model named Multi-view Intent Disentangle Graph Networks (MIDGN), which is capable of precisely and comprehensively capturing the diversity of the user's intent and items' associations at the finer granularity. Specifically, MIDGN disentangles the user's intents from two different perspectives, respectively: 1) In the global level, MIDGN disentangles the user's intent coupled with inter-bundle items; 2) In the Local level, MIDGN disentangles the user's intent coupled with items within each bundle. Meanwhile, we compare the user's intents disentangled from different views under the contrast learning framework to improve the learned intents. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that MIDGN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by over 10.7% and 26.8%, respectively.