Intent Propagation Contrastive Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

Disentanglement techniques used in collaborative filtering uncover interaction intents between nodes, improving the interpretability of node representations and enhancing recommendation performance. However, existing disentanglement methods still face the following two problems. 1) They focus on local structural features derived from direct node interactions, overlooking the comprehensive graph structure, which limits disentanglement accuracy. 2) The disentanglement process depends on backpropagation signals derived from recommendation tasks, lacking direct supervision, which may lead to biases and overfitting. To address the issues, we propose the Intent Propagation Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (IPCCF) algorithm. Specifically, we design a double helix message propagation framework to more effectively extract the deep semantic information of nodes, thereby improving the model's understanding of interactions between nodes. An intent message propagation method is also developed that incorporates graph structure information into the disentanglement process, thereby expanding the consideration scope of disentanglement. In addition, contrastive learning techniques are employed to align node representations derived from the structure and intents, providing direct supervision for the disentanglement process, mitigating biases, and enhancing the model's robustness to overfitting. The experiments on three real data graphs illustrate the superiority of the proposed approach.