Disentangling User Cognitive Intent with Causal Reasoning for Knowledge-Enhanced Recommendation

The primary objective of an effective recommender system is to provide accurate, varied, and personalized recommendations that align with the user’s cognitive intents. Given their ability to represent structural and semantic information effectively, knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly being utilized to capture auxiliary information for recommendation systems. This trend is supported by the recent advancements in graph neural network (GNN)-based models for KG-aware recommendations. However, these models often struggle with issues such as insufficient user-item interactions and the misalignment of user intent weights during information propagation. Additionally, they face a popularity bias, which is exacerbated by the disproportionate influence of a small number of highly active users and the limited auxiliary information about items. This bias significantly curtails the effectiveness of the recommendations. To address this issue, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced User Cognitive Intent Network (KeCAIN), which incorporates item category information to capture user intents with information aggregation and eliminate popularity bias based on causal reasoning in recommendation systems. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that KeCAIN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.