Adaptive multi-graph contrastive learning for bundle recommendation

Abstract

Recently, recommending bundles - sets of items that complement each other - instead of individual items to users has drawn much attention in both academia and industry. Models based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for bundle recommendation have achieved great success in capturing users’ preferences by modeling pairwise correlations among users, bundles, and items via information propagation on graphs. However, a notable limitation lies in their insufficient focus on explicitly modeling intricate ternary relationships. Additionally, the loose combination of node embeddings from different graphs tends to introduce noise, as it fails to consider disparities among the graphs. To this end, we propose a novel approach called Adaptive Multi-Graph Contrastive Learning for Bundle Recommendation (AMCBR). Specifically, AMCBR models ternary interactions by constructing multiple graphs, including a bundle preference graph based on direct user-bundle interactions, a collaborative neighborhoods graph featuring user-level and bundle-level subgraphs, and an item-level preference hypergraph capturing indirect user-bundle relationships through items. Then, (hyper)graph convolution is applied to each (hyper)graph to encode diverse potential preferences into node embeddings. To enhance the model’s robustness, an adaptive aggregation module is employed to assign varying weights to node embeddings from different graphs during the fusion process, which enriches the semantic and comprehensive information in the embeddings while mitigating potential noise. Finally, a contrastive learning strategy is proposed to jointly optimize the model, strengthening collaborative links between individual graphs. Extensive experiments on three real datasets demonstrate that AMCBR can outperform the state-of-the-art baselines on the Top-K recommendations.