Bilateral Intent-Enhanced Sequential Recommendation with Embedding Perturbation-Based Contrastive Learning

Accurately modeling users' evolving preferences from sequential interactions remains a central challenge in recommender systems. Recent studies emphasize the importance of capturing multiple latent intents underlying user behaviors. However, existing methods often fail to effectively exploit collective intent signals shared across users and items, leading to information isolation and limited robustness. Meanwhile, current contrastive learning approaches struggle to construct views that are both semantically consistent and sufficiently discriminative. In this work, we propose BIPCL, an end-to-end Bilateral Intent-enhanced, Embedding Perturbation-based Contrastive Learning framework. BIPCL explicitly integrates multi-intent signals into both item and sequence representations via a bilateral intent-enhancement mechanism. Specifically, shared intent prototypes on the user and item sides capture collective intent semantics distilled from behaviorally similar entities, which are subsequently integrated into representation learning. This design alleviates information isolation and improves robustness under sparse supervision. To construct effective contrastive views without disrupting temporal or structural dependencies, BIPCL injects bounded, direction-aware perturbations directly into structural item embeddings. On this basis, BIPCL further enforces multi-level contrastive alignment across interaction- and intent-level representations. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that BIPCL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with ablation studies confirming the contribution of each component.

Dual-View Disentangled Multi-Intent Learning for Enhanced Collaborative Filtering

Disentangling user intentions from implicit feedback has become a promising strategy to enhance recommendation accuracy and interpretability. Prior methods often model intentions independently and lack explicit supervision, thus failing to capture the joint semantics that drive user-item interactions. To address these limitations, we propose DMICF, a unified framework that explicitly models interaction-level intent alignment while leveraging structural signals from both user and item perspectives. DMICF adopts a dual-view architecture that jointly encodes user-item interaction graphs from both sides, enabling bidirectional information fusion. This design enhances robustness under data sparsity by allowing the structural redundancy of one view to compensate for the limitations of the other. To model fine-grained user-item compatibility, DMICF introduces an intent interaction encoder that performs sub-intent alignment within each view, uncovering shared semantic structures that underlie user decisions. This localized alignment enables adaptive refinement of intent embeddings based on interaction context, thus improving the model's generalization and expressiveness, particularly in long-tail scenarios. Furthermore, DMICF integrates an intent-aware scoring mechanism that aggregates compatibility signals from matched intent pairs across user and item subspaces, enabling personalized prediction grounded in semantic congruence rather than entangled representations. To facilitate semantic disentanglement, we design a discriminative training signal via multi-negative sampling and softmax normalization, which pulls together semantically aligned intent pairs while pushing apart irrelevant or noisy ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DMICF consistently delivers robust performance across datasets with diverse interaction distributions.

Rethinking the positive role of cluster structure in complex networks for link prediction tasks

Clustering is a fundamental problem in network analysis that finds closely connected groups of nodes and separates them from other nodes in the graph, while link prediction is to predict whether two nodes in a network are likely to have a link. The definition of both naturally determines that clustering must play a positive role in obtaining accurate link prediction tasks. Yet researchers have long ignored or used inappropriate ways to undermine this positive relationship. In this article, We construct a simple but efficient clustering-driven link prediction framework(ClusterLP), with the goal of directly exploiting the cluster structures to obtain connections between nodes as accurately as possible in both undirected graphs and directed graphs. Specifically, we propose that it is easier to establish links between nodes with similar representation vectors and cluster tendencies in undirected graphs, while nodes in a directed graphs can more easily point to nodes similar to their representation vectors and have greater influence in their own cluster. We customized the implementation of ClusterLP for undirected and directed graphs, respectively, and the experimental results using multiple real-world networks on the link prediction task showed that our models is highly competitive with existing baseline models. The code implementation of ClusterLP and baselines we use are available at https://github.com/ZINUX1998/ClusterLP.

DyCSC: Modeling the Evolutionary Process of Dynamic Networks Based on Cluster Structure

Temporal networks are an important type of network whose topological structure changes over time. Compared with methods on static networks, temporal network embedding (TNE) methods are facing three challenges: 1) it cannot describe the temporal dependence across network snapshots; 2) the node embedding in the latent space fails to indicate changes in the network topology; and 3) it cannot avoid a lot of redundant computation via parameter inheritance on a series of snapshots. To this end, we propose a novel temporal network embedding method named Dynamic Cluster Structure Constraint model (DyCSC), whose core idea is to capture the evolution of temporal networks by imposing a temporal constraint on the tendency of the nodes in the network to a given number of clusters. It not only generates low-dimensional embedding vectors for nodes but also preserves the dynamic nonlinear features of temporal networks. Experimental results on multiple realworld datasets have demonstrated the superiority of DyCSC for temporal graph embedding, as it consistently outperforms competing methods by significant margins in multiple temporal link prediction tasks. Moreover, the ablation study further validates the effectiveness of the proposed temporal constraint.