Modality-Aware Identity Construction and Counterfactual Structure Learning for ID-Free Multimodal Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Ma, Hongjian, Huang, Wenxin, Zhang, Yan, Li, Zhifei, Wang, Zheng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866914577448435712
author Ma, Hongjian
Huang, Wenxin
Zhang, Yan
Li, Zhifei
Wang, Zheng
author_facet Ma, Hongjian
Huang, Wenxin
Zhang, Yan
Li, Zhifei
Wang, Zheng
contents Multimodal recommendation has attracted extensive attention by leveraging heterogeneous modality information to alleviate data sparsity and improve recommendation accuracy. Existing methods have attempted to replace ID embeddings with multimodal features and have achieved promising preliminary results. However, these methods still exhibit the following two limitations: (1) the reconstructed ID representations remain relatively static and fail to fully exploit multimodal semantics; and (2) the graph learning process is insufficient in mining latent long-tail semantic relations and is easily affected by popularity bias. To address these issues, we propose a novel method named Modality-Aware Identity Construction and Counterfactual Structure Learning for ID-free Multimodal Recommendation (MAIL). Specifically, we design a modality-aware identity construction module that dynamically modulates positional encodings with multimodal semantics to construct content-aware ID-free identity representations. Then, we propose a counterfactual structure learning paradigm that mines low-exposure semantic neighbors via popularity penalization and alleviates popularity bias. Extensive experiments are conducted on five public Amazon datasets. Experimental results show that MAIL achieves average improvements of 7.81% in Recall@10 and 12.81% in NDCG@10 compared with the baseline models. Our code is available at https://github.com/HubuKG/MAIL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18044
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modality-Aware Identity Construction and Counterfactual Structure Learning for ID-Free Multimodal Recommendation
Ma, Hongjian
Huang, Wenxin
Zhang, Yan
Li, Zhifei
Wang, Zheng
Information Retrieval
Multimedia
Multimodal recommendation has attracted extensive attention by leveraging heterogeneous modality information to alleviate data sparsity and improve recommendation accuracy. Existing methods have attempted to replace ID embeddings with multimodal features and have achieved promising preliminary results. However, these methods still exhibit the following two limitations: (1) the reconstructed ID representations remain relatively static and fail to fully exploit multimodal semantics; and (2) the graph learning process is insufficient in mining latent long-tail semantic relations and is easily affected by popularity bias. To address these issues, we propose a novel method named Modality-Aware Identity Construction and Counterfactual Structure Learning for ID-free Multimodal Recommendation (MAIL). Specifically, we design a modality-aware identity construction module that dynamically modulates positional encodings with multimodal semantics to construct content-aware ID-free identity representations. Then, we propose a counterfactual structure learning paradigm that mines low-exposure semantic neighbors via popularity penalization and alleviates popularity bias. Extensive experiments are conducted on five public Amazon datasets. Experimental results show that MAIL achieves average improvements of 7.81% in Recall@10 and 12.81% in NDCG@10 compared with the baseline models. Our code is available at https://github.com/HubuKG/MAIL.
title Modality-Aware Identity Construction and Counterfactual Structure Learning for ID-Free Multimodal Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18044