DualVAE: Dual Disentangled Variational AutoEncoder for Recommendation

Learning precise representations of users and items to fit observed interaction data is the fundamental task of collaborative filtering. Existing studies usually infer entangled representations to fit such interaction data, neglecting to model the diverse matching relationships between users and items behind their interactions, leading to limited performance and weak interpretability. To address this problem, we propose a Dual Disentangled Variational AutoEncoder (DualVAE) for collaborative recommendation, which combines disentangled representation learning with variational inference to facilitate the generation of implicit interaction data. Specifically, we first implement the disentangling concept by unifying an attention-aware dual disentanglement and disentangled variational autoencoder to infer the disentangled latent representations of users and items. Further, to encourage the correspondence and independence of disentangled representations of users and items, we design a neighborhood-enhanced representation constraint with a customized contrastive mechanism to improve the representation quality. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks show that our proposed model significantly outperforms several recent state-of-the-art baselines. Further empirical experimental results also illustrate the interpretability of the disentangled representations learned by DualVAE.

LGMRec: Local and Global Graph Learning for Multimodal Recommendation

The multimodal recommendation has gradually become the infrastructure of online media platforms, enabling them to provide personalized service to users through a joint modeling of user historical behaviors (e.g., purchases, clicks) and item various modalities (e.g., visual and textual). The majority of existing studies typically focus on utilizing modal features or modal-related graph structure to learn user local interests. Nevertheless, these approaches encounter two limitations: (1) Shared updates of user ID embeddings result in the consequential coupling between collaboration and multimodal signals; (2) Lack of exploration into robust global user interests to alleviate the sparse interaction problems faced by local interest modeling. To address these issues, we propose a novel Local and Global Graph Learning-guided Multimodal Recommender (LGMRec), which jointly models local and global user interests. Specifically, we present a local graph embedding module to independently learn collaborative-related and modality-related embeddings of users and items with local topological relations. Moreover, a global hypergraph embedding module is designed to capture global user and item embeddings by modeling insightful global dependency relations. The global embeddings acquired within the hypergraph embedding space can then be combined with two decoupled local embeddings to improve the accuracy and robustness of recommendations. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our LGMRec over various state-of-the-art recommendation baselines, showcasing its effectiveness in modeling both local and global user interests.