Mitigating Recommendation Biases via Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity in Representation Learning

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Hauptverfasser: Cai, Miaomiao, Hou, Min, Chen, Lei, Wu, Le, Bai, Haoyue, Li, Yong, Wang, Meng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Cai, Miaomiao
Hou, Min
Chen, Lei
Wu, Le
Bai, Haoyue
Li, Yong
Wang, Meng
author_facet Cai, Miaomiao
Hou, Min
Chen, Lei
Wu, Le
Bai, Haoyue
Li, Yong
Wang, Meng
contents Collaborative Filtering~(CF) plays a crucial role in modern recommender systems, leveraging historical user-item interactions to provide personalized suggestions. However, CF-based methods often encounter biases due to imbalances in training data. This phenomenon makes CF-based methods tend to prioritize recommending popular items and performing unsatisfactorily on inactive users. Existing works address this issue by rebalancing training samples, reranking recommendation results, or making the modeling process robust to the bias. Despite their effectiveness, these approaches can compromise accuracy or be sensitive to weighting strategies, making them challenging to train. In this paper, we deeply analyze the causes and effects of the biases and propose a framework to alleviate biases in recommendation from the perspective of representation distribution, namely Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity Enhanced Representation Learning for Debiasing Recommendation (AURL). Specifically, we identify two significant problems in the representation distribution of users and items, namely group-discrepancy and global-collapse. These two problems directly lead to biases in the recommendation results. To this end, we propose two simple but effective regularizers in the representation space, respectively named group-alignment and global-uniformity. The goal of group-alignment is to bring the representation distribution of long-tail entities closer to that of popular entities, while global-uniformity aims to preserve the information of entities as much as possible by evenly distributing representations. Our method directly optimizes both the group-alignment and global-uniformity regularization terms to mitigate recommendation biases. Extensive experiments on three real datasets and various recommendation backbones verify the superiority of our proposed framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_13041
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Recommendation Biases via Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity in Representation Learning
Cai, Miaomiao
Hou, Min
Chen, Lei
Wu, Le
Bai, Haoyue
Li, Yong
Wang, Meng
Information Retrieval
Collaborative Filtering~(CF) plays a crucial role in modern recommender systems, leveraging historical user-item interactions to provide personalized suggestions. However, CF-based methods often encounter biases due to imbalances in training data. This phenomenon makes CF-based methods tend to prioritize recommending popular items and performing unsatisfactorily on inactive users. Existing works address this issue by rebalancing training samples, reranking recommendation results, or making the modeling process robust to the bias. Despite their effectiveness, these approaches can compromise accuracy or be sensitive to weighting strategies, making them challenging to train. In this paper, we deeply analyze the causes and effects of the biases and propose a framework to alleviate biases in recommendation from the perspective of representation distribution, namely Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity Enhanced Representation Learning for Debiasing Recommendation (AURL). Specifically, we identify two significant problems in the representation distribution of users and items, namely group-discrepancy and global-collapse. These two problems directly lead to biases in the recommendation results. To this end, we propose two simple but effective regularizers in the representation space, respectively named group-alignment and global-uniformity. The goal of group-alignment is to bring the representation distribution of long-tail entities closer to that of popular entities, while global-uniformity aims to preserve the information of entities as much as possible by evenly distributing representations. Our method directly optimizes both the group-alignment and global-uniformity regularization terms to mitigate recommendation biases. Extensive experiments on three real datasets and various recommendation backbones verify the superiority of our proposed framework.
title Mitigating Recommendation Biases via Group-Alignment and Global-Uniformity in Representation Learning
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13041