Sequences as Nodes for Contrastive Multimodal Graph Recommendation

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Main Authors: Sahyouni, Bucher, Vowels, Matthew, Chen, Liqun, Hadfield, Simon
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Sahyouni, Bucher
Vowels, Matthew
Chen, Liqun
Hadfield, Simon
author_facet Sahyouni, Bucher
Vowels, Matthew
Chen, Liqun
Hadfield, Simon
contents To tackle cold-start and data sparsity issues in recommender systems, numerous multimodal, sequential, and contrastive techniques have been proposed. While these augmentations can boost recommendation performance, they tend to add noise and disrupt useful semantics. To address this, we propose MuSICRec (Multimodal Sequence-Item Contrastive Recommender), a multi-view graph-based recommender that combines collaborative, sequential, and multimodal signals. We build a sequence-item (SI) view by attention pooling over the user's interacted items to form sequence nodes. We propagate over the SI graph, obtaining a second view organically as an alternative to artificial data augmentation, while simultaneously injecting sequential context signals. Additionally, to mitigate modality noise and align the multimodal information, the contribution of text and visual features is modulated according to an ID-guided gate. We evaluate under a strict leave-two-out split against a broad range of sequential, multimodal, and contrastive baselines. On the Amazon Baby, Sports, and Electronics datasets, MuSICRec outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across all model types. We observe the largest gains for short-history users, mitigating sparsity and cold-start challenges. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MuSICRec-3CEE/ and will be made publicly available.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07208
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sequences as Nodes for Contrastive Multimodal Graph Recommendation
Sahyouni, Bucher
Vowels, Matthew
Chen, Liqun
Hadfield, Simon
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
To tackle cold-start and data sparsity issues in recommender systems, numerous multimodal, sequential, and contrastive techniques have been proposed. While these augmentations can boost recommendation performance, they tend to add noise and disrupt useful semantics. To address this, we propose MuSICRec (Multimodal Sequence-Item Contrastive Recommender), a multi-view graph-based recommender that combines collaborative, sequential, and multimodal signals. We build a sequence-item (SI) view by attention pooling over the user's interacted items to form sequence nodes. We propagate over the SI graph, obtaining a second view organically as an alternative to artificial data augmentation, while simultaneously injecting sequential context signals. Additionally, to mitigate modality noise and align the multimodal information, the contribution of text and visual features is modulated according to an ID-guided gate. We evaluate under a strict leave-two-out split against a broad range of sequential, multimodal, and contrastive baselines. On the Amazon Baby, Sports, and Electronics datasets, MuSICRec outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across all model types. We observe the largest gains for short-history users, mitigating sparsity and cold-start challenges. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MuSICRec-3CEE/ and will be made publicly available.
title Sequences as Nodes for Contrastive Multimodal Graph Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07208