English

Multi-Relational Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Information Retrieval 2023-10-23 v3

Abstract

Personalized recommender systems play a crucial role in capturing users' evolving preferences over time to provide accurate and effective recommendations on various online platforms. However, many recommendation models rely on a single type of behavior learning, which limits their ability to represent the complex relationships between users and items in real-life scenarios. In such situations, users interact with items in multiple ways, including clicking, tagging as favorite, reviewing, and purchasing. To address this issue, we propose the Relation-aware Contrastive Learning (RCL) framework, which effectively models dynamic interaction heterogeneity. The RCL model incorporates a multi-relational graph encoder that captures short-term preference heterogeneity while preserving the dedicated relation semantics for different types of user-item interactions. Moreover, we design a dynamic cross-relational memory network that enables the RCL model to capture users' long-term multi-behavior preferences and the underlying evolving cross-type behavior dependencies over time. To obtain robust and informative user representations with both commonality and diversity across multi-behavior interactions, we introduce a multi-relational contrastive learning paradigm with heterogeneous short- and long-term interest modeling. Our extensive experimental studies on several real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the RCL recommender system over various state-of-the-art baselines in terms of recommendation accuracy and effectiveness.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.01103,
  title  = {Multi-Relational Contrastive Learning for Recommendation},
  author = {Wei Wei and Lianghao Xia and Chao Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.01103},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

This paper has been published as a full paper at RecSys 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:11:23.288Z