How Does Message Passing Improve Collaborative Filtering?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ju, Mingxuan, Shiao, William, Guo, Zhichun, Ye, Yanfang, Liu, Yozen, Shah, Neil, Zhao, Tong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ju, Mingxuan
Shiao, William
Guo, Zhichun
Ye, Yanfang
Liu, Yozen
Shah, Neil
Zhao, Tong
author_facet Ju, Mingxuan
Shiao, William
Guo, Zhichun
Ye, Yanfang
Liu, Yozen
Shah, Neil
Zhao, Tong
contents Collaborative filtering (CF) has exhibited prominent results for recommender systems and been broadly utilized for real-world applications. A branch of research enhances CF methods by message passing used in graph neural networks, due to its strong capabilities of extracting knowledge from graph-structured data, like user-item bipartite graphs that naturally exist in CF. They assume that message passing helps CF methods in a manner akin to its benefits for graph-based learning tasks in general. However, even though message passing empirically improves CF, whether or not this assumption is correct still needs verification. To address this gap, we formally investigate why message passing helps CF from multiple perspectives and show that many assumptions made by previous works are not entirely accurate. With our curated ablation studies and theoretical analyses, we discover that (1) message passing improves the CF performance primarily by additional representations passed from neighbors during the forward pass instead of additional gradient updates to neighbor representations during the model back-propagation and (ii) message passing usually helps low-degree nodes more than high-degree nodes. Utilizing these novel findings, we present Test-time Aggregation for CF, namely TAG-CF, a test-time augmentation framework that only conducts message passing once at inference time. The key novelty of TAG-CF is that it effectively utilizes graph knowledge while circumventing most of notorious computational overheads of message passing. Besides, TAG-CF is extremely versatile can be used as a plug-and-play module to enhance representations trained by different CF supervision signals. Evaluated on six datasets, TAG-CF consistently improves the recommendation performance of CF methods without graph by up to 39.2% on cold users and 31.7% on all users, with little to no extra computational overheads.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_08660
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Does Message Passing Improve Collaborative Filtering?
Ju, Mingxuan
Shiao, William
Guo, Zhichun
Ye, Yanfang
Liu, Yozen
Shah, Neil
Zhao, Tong
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Collaborative filtering (CF) has exhibited prominent results for recommender systems and been broadly utilized for real-world applications. A branch of research enhances CF methods by message passing used in graph neural networks, due to its strong capabilities of extracting knowledge from graph-structured data, like user-item bipartite graphs that naturally exist in CF. They assume that message passing helps CF methods in a manner akin to its benefits for graph-based learning tasks in general. However, even though message passing empirically improves CF, whether or not this assumption is correct still needs verification. To address this gap, we formally investigate why message passing helps CF from multiple perspectives and show that many assumptions made by previous works are not entirely accurate. With our curated ablation studies and theoretical analyses, we discover that (1) message passing improves the CF performance primarily by additional representations passed from neighbors during the forward pass instead of additional gradient updates to neighbor representations during the model back-propagation and (ii) message passing usually helps low-degree nodes more than high-degree nodes. Utilizing these novel findings, we present Test-time Aggregation for CF, namely TAG-CF, a test-time augmentation framework that only conducts message passing once at inference time. The key novelty of TAG-CF is that it effectively utilizes graph knowledge while circumventing most of notorious computational overheads of message passing. Besides, TAG-CF is extremely versatile can be used as a plug-and-play module to enhance representations trained by different CF supervision signals. Evaluated on six datasets, TAG-CF consistently improves the recommendation performance of CF methods without graph by up to 39.2% on cold users and 31.7% on all users, with little to no extra computational overheads.
title How Does Message Passing Improve Collaborative Filtering?
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.08660