Challenging Low Homophily in Social Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Jiang, Wei, Gao, Xinyi, Xu, Guandong, Chen, Tong, Yin, Hongzhi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Jiang, Wei
Gao, Xinyi
Xu, Guandong
Chen, Tong
Yin, Hongzhi
author_facet Jiang, Wei
Gao, Xinyi
Xu, Guandong
Chen, Tong
Yin, Hongzhi
contents Social relations are leveraged to tackle the sparsity issue of user-item interaction data in recommendation under the assumption of social homophily. However, social recommendation paradigms predominantly focus on homophily based on user preferences. While social information can enhance recommendations, its alignment with user preferences is not guaranteed, thereby posing the risk of introducing informational redundancy. We empirically discover that social graphs in real recommendation data exhibit low preference-aware homophily, which limits the effect of social recommendation models. To comprehensively extract preference-aware homophily information latent in the social graph, we propose Social Heterophily-alleviating Rewiring (SHaRe), a data-centric framework for enhancing existing graph-based social recommendation models. We adopt Graph Rewiring technique to capture and add highly homophilic social relations, and cut low homophilic (or heterophilic) relations. To better refine the user representations from reliable social relations, we integrate a contrastive learning method into the training of SHaRe, aiming to calibrate the user representations for enhancing the result of Graph Rewiring. Experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed framework not only exhibits enhanced performances across varying homophily ratios but also improves the performance of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) social recommendation models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_14606
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Challenging Low Homophily in Social Recommendation
Jiang, Wei
Gao, Xinyi
Xu, Guandong
Chen, Tong
Yin, Hongzhi
Information Retrieval
Social relations are leveraged to tackle the sparsity issue of user-item interaction data in recommendation under the assumption of social homophily. However, social recommendation paradigms predominantly focus on homophily based on user preferences. While social information can enhance recommendations, its alignment with user preferences is not guaranteed, thereby posing the risk of introducing informational redundancy. We empirically discover that social graphs in real recommendation data exhibit low preference-aware homophily, which limits the effect of social recommendation models. To comprehensively extract preference-aware homophily information latent in the social graph, we propose Social Heterophily-alleviating Rewiring (SHaRe), a data-centric framework for enhancing existing graph-based social recommendation models. We adopt Graph Rewiring technique to capture and add highly homophilic social relations, and cut low homophilic (or heterophilic) relations. To better refine the user representations from reliable social relations, we integrate a contrastive learning method into the training of SHaRe, aiming to calibrate the user representations for enhancing the result of Graph Rewiring. Experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed framework not only exhibits enhanced performances across varying homophily ratios but also improves the performance of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) social recommendation models.
title Challenging Low Homophily in Social Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.14606