RDRec: Rationale Distillation for LLM-based Recommendation

Large language model (LLM)-based recommender models that bridge users and items through textual prompts for effective semantic reasoning have gained considerable attention. However, few methods consider the underlying rationales behind interactions, such as user preferences and item attributes, limiting the reasoning capability of LLMs for recommendations. This paper proposes a rationale distillation recommender (RDRec), a compact model designed to learn rationales generated by a larger language model (LM). By leveraging rationales from reviews related to users and items, RDRec remarkably specifies their profiles for recommendations. Experiments show that RDRec achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both top-N and sequential recommendations. Our source code is released at https://github.com/WangXFng/RDRec.

CaDRec: Contextualized and Debiased Recommender Model

Recommender models aimed at mining users' behavioral patterns have raised great attention as one of the essential applications in daily life. Recent work on graph neural networks (GNNs) or debiasing methods has attained remarkable gains. However, they still suffer from (1) over-smoothing node embeddings caused by recursive convolutions with GNNs, and (2) the skewed distribution of interactions due to popularity and user-individual biases. This paper proposes a contextualized and debiased recommender model (CaDRec). To overcome the over-smoothing issue, we explore a novel hypergraph convolution operator that can select effective neighbors during convolution by introducing both structural context and sequential context. To tackle the skewed distribution, we propose two strategies for disentangling interactions: (1) modeling individual biases to learn unbiased item embeddings, and (2) incorporating item popularity with positional encoding. Moreover, we mathematically show that the imbalance of the gradients to update item embeddings exacerbates the popularity bias, thus adopting regularization and weighting schemes as solutions. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the superiority of the CaDRec against state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Our source code and data are released at https://github.com/WangXFng/CaDRec.

NFARec: A Negative Feedback-Aware Recommender Model

Graph neural network (GNN)-based models have been extensively studied for recommendations, as they can extract high-order collaborative signals accurately which is required for high-quality recommender systems. However, they neglect the valuable information gained through negative feedback in two aspects: (1) different users might hold opposite feedback on the same item, which hampers optimal information propagation in GNNs, and (2) even when an item vastly deviates from users' preferences, they might still choose it and provide a negative rating. In this paper, we propose a negative feedback-aware recommender model (NFARec) that maximizes the leverage of negative feedback. To transfer information to multi-hop neighbors along an optimal path effectively, NFARec adopts a feedback-aware correlation that guides hypergraph convolutions (HGCs) to learn users' structural representations. Moreover, NFARec incorporates an auxiliary task - predicting the feedback sentiment polarity (i.e., positive or negative) of the next interaction - based on the Transformer Hawkes Process. The task is beneficial for understanding users by learning the sentiment expressed in their previous sequential feedback patterns and predicting future interactions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NFARec outperforms competitive baselines. Our source code and data are released at https://github.com/WangXFng/NFARec.

Enhanced Coherence-Aware Network with Hierarchical Disentanglement for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-category-based sentiment analysis (ACSA), which aims to identify aspect categories and predict their sentiments has been intensively studied due to its wide range of NLP applications. Most approaches mainly utilize intrasentential features. However, a review often includes multiple different aspect categories, and some of them do not explicitly appear in the review. Even in a sentence, there is more than one aspect category with its sentiments, and they are entangled intra-sentence, which makes the model fail to discriminately preserve all sentiment characteristics. In this paper, we propose an enhanced coherence-aware network with hierarchical disentanglement (ECAN) for ACSA tasks. Specifically, we explore coherence modeling to capture the contexts across the whole review and to help the implicit aspect and sentiment identification. To address the issue of multiple aspect categories and sentiment entanglement, we propose a hierarchical disentanglement module to extract distinct categories and sentiment features. Extensive experimental and visualization results show that our ECAN effectively decouples multiple categories and sentiments entangled in the coherence representations and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our codes and data are available online: \url{https://github.com/cuijin-23/ECAN}.