Contrastive learning has demonstrated promising potential in recommender systems. Existing methods typically construct sparser views by randomly perturbing the original interaction graph, as they have no idea about the authentic user preferences. Owing to the sparse nature of recommendation data, this paradigm can only capture insufficient semantic information. To address the issue, we propose InfoDCL, a novel diffusion-based contrastive learning framework for recommendation. Rather than injecting randomly sampled Gaussian noise, we employ a single-step diffusion process that integrates noise with auxiliary semantic information to generate signals and feed them to the standard diffusion process to generate authentic user preferences as contrastive views. Besides, based on a comprehensive analysis of the mutual influence between generation and preference learning in InfoDCL, we build a collaborative training objective strategy to transform the interference between them into mutual collaboration. Additionally, we employ multiple GCN layers only during inference stage to incorporate higher-order co-occurrence information while maintaining training efficiency. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that InfoDCL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our InfoDCL offers an effective solution for enhancing recommendation performance and suggests a novel paradigm for applying diffusion method in contrastive learning frameworks.

Cross-domain sequential recommendation (CDSR) aims to utilize users' interactions across multiple domains to alleviate the problem of interaction sparsity that is prevalent in web platforms, thereby providing more accurate personalized recommendations. Although current CDSR methods have made some progress, they suffer from two main limitations: (i) assuming uniformly distributed interactions over time; and (ii) neglecting temporal influences during cross-domain transfer. In order to address the above issues, we propose a novel Time-Aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation framework (TA-CDSR ). First, we design a time-sensitive attention which captures user preferences over time by decoupling interaction sequences and time sequences. Second, we propose a time-guided preference generator that can reconstruct the lacking interactions in the target domain by taking the source domain interactions time as guidance information. Finally, we design a multi-scale time windows based domain transfer module, which can dynamically identify the temporal interaction density and thus adaptively assign the weights of cross-domain information. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets indicate that TA-CDSR achieves competitive time complexity while outperforming other baselines.

In recent years, social recommendation systems have emerged as a pivotal technology for enhancing recommendation accuracy by leveraging user social homophily and influence. Although many works have been devoted to this area, existing works still struggle to extract the beneficial structural information from social relationships that is beneficial for recommendations and neglect the inherent popularity bias in the social networks, which leads to suboptimal recommendation performances. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework termed Causal Disentanglement-Enhanced Diffusion Denoising for Social Recommendation (CaDDiSR). This framework first employs causal graphs to disentangle the complexities of social relationships, generating user representations with high-order structures, which are subsequently used as inputs to a diffusion process to effectively denoise social networks and retain social signals beneficial for recommendation tasks. Furthermore, the framework integrates a bidirectional knowledge distillation mechanism, which balances user representations between social and recommendation contexts, thereby facilitating the effective fusion of their respective advantages while simultaneously mitigating noise interference and enhancing overall system performance. Finally, cross-domain contrastive learning is utilized to optimize user and item representations, ensuring consistency in recommendation performance across diverse scenarios. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that CaDDiSR significantly outperforms existing baseline models, substantiating its superior performance.

Session-based recommendation (SBR) systems have increasingly focused on hypergraph-based approaches due to their potent capability in capturing high-order item relationships. Typically, existing approaches rely on sequential item relations to manually construct fixed hypergraphs. However, this methodology neglects the multiple relations inherent in the original sequences, thereby impeding the hypergraph’s precision in discerning user preferences. Furthermore, the rigidity of fixed hypergraph structures tends to emphasize explicit relationships, ignoring the latent implicit patterns. In light of this, we present a novel Multi-relation enhanced Dynamic HyperGraph (MDHG) learning framework for session-based recommendation, to model intricate and variable item relations. Initially, we establish three distinct relation graphs which capture separate user behavior patterns to extract personalized interest preferences under differentiated intentions. Subsequently, we propose an enhanced dynamic hypergraph paradigm that adaptively generates hypergraph structures based on prior relation graph, thereby reinforcing and unveiling implicit connectivity relations in a layer-aware manner. Finally, to mitigate the noise among diverse relations, we introduce the maximum mutual information auxiliary task and employ the attention mechanism as a cross-relation aggregator. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets verify the superiority of our MDHG model. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Qin-lab-code/MDHG .

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) interact with users through natural language to provide recommendations and generate responses. Due to limited information in conversation, existing works utilize KGs or reviews to improve CRS. Despite achievements, they overlook co-occurrence relations which have shown effectiveness in collaborative filtering systems. In this work, we first propose a novel framework named CoCRS , aiming to incorporate Co-occurrences into the Review-based Conversation Recommendation Systems . In CoCRS, we mine co-occurrences from two aspects: (1) item and entity , (2) user and item . For the first one, we extract entities from redundant review texts by KG and construct a relation-aware item-entity heterogeneous graph. In the second aspect, we analyze review sentiments and construct a sentiment-aware user-item bipartite graph. We encode two graphs to obtain user and entity embeddings. Since users in CRS are anonymous, we generate a virtual similar user representation to match reviews with users. Besides, we capture time-aware preference representation from two-time dimensions. Finally, we generate word-level user representation with word-oriented KG and model user preference by integrating the above representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoCRS outperforms baselines and the cold-start experiment highlights its robustness. The Large Language Model (LLM) experiment illustrates the significant role of co-occurrence relationships in LLM-based CRS. Our code are available at https://github.com/Qin-lab-code/CoCRS .

Sequential recommendation (SR) is widely deployed in e-commerce platforms, streaming services, etc., revealing significant potential to enhance user experience. The core of SR lies in exploring the sequential relationships in historical user-item interactions. However, existing methods often overlook two critical factors: irregular user interests between interactions and highly uneven item distributions over time. The former factor implies that actual user preferences are not always continuous, and long-term historical interactions may not be relevant to current purchasing behavior. Therefore, relying only on these historical interactions for recommendations may result in a lack of user interest at the target time. The latter factor, characterized by peaks and valleys in interaction frequency, may result from seasonal trends, special events, or promotions. These externally driven distributions may not align with individual user interests, leading to inaccurate recommendations. To address these deficiencies, we propose TGODE to both enhance and capture the long-term historical interactions. Specifically, we first construct the user time graph and item evolution graph, which utilize user personalized preferences and global item distribution information, respectively. To tackle the temporal sparsity caused by irregular user interactions, we design a time-guided diffusion generator to automatically obtain an augmented time-aware user graph. Additionally, we devise a user interest truncation factor to efficiently identify sparse time intervals and achieve balanced preference inference. After that, the augmented user graph and item graph are fed into a generalized graph neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) to align with the evolution of user preferences and item distributions. This allows two patterns of information evolution to be matched over time. Experimental results demonstrate that TGODE outperforms baseline methods across five datasets, with improvements ranging from 10% to 46%. The code is available at https://github.com/Qin-lab-code/TGODE.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention in recommender systems for their excellent world knowledge capabilities. However, existing methods that rely on Euclidean space struggle to capture the rich hierarchical information inherent in textual and semantic data, which is essential for capturing user preferences. The geometric properties of hyperbolic space offer a promising solution to address this issue. Nevertheless, integrating LLMs-based methods with hyperbolic space to effectively extract and incorporate diverse hierarchical information is non-trivial. To this end, we propose a model-agnostic framework, named HyperLLM, which extracts and integrates hierarchical information from both structural and semantic perspectives. Structurally, HyperLLM uses LLMs to generate multi-level classification tags with hierarchical parent-child relationships for each item. Then, tag-item and user-item interactions are jointly learned and aligned through contrastive learning, thereby providing the model with clear hierarchical information. Semantically, HyperLLM introduces a novel meta-optimized strategy to extract hierarchical information from semantic embeddings and bridge the gap between the semantic and collaborative spaces for seamless integration. Extensive experiments show that HyperLLM significantly outperforms recommender systems based on hyperbolic space and LLMs, achieving performance improvements of over 40%. Furthermore, HyperLLM not only improves recommender performance but also enhances training stability, highlighting the critical role of hierarchical information in recommender systems.

The best arm identification problem in multi-armed bandit model has been widely applied into many practical applications, such as spectrum sensing, online advertising, and cloud computing. Although lots of works have been devoted into this area, most of them do not consider the cost of pulling actions, i.e., a player has to pay some cost when she pulls an arm. Motivated by this, we study a ratio-based best arm identification problem, where each arm is associated with a random reward as well as a random cost. For any \(\delta\in(0,1)\) , with probability at least \(1-\delta\) , the player aims to find the arm with the largest ratio of expected reward to expected cost using as few samplings as possible. Specifically, we consider two settings: (1) the precise setting, i.e., identifying the precise optimal one; (2) the Probably Approximate Correct (PAC) setting, which identifies the \(\epsilon\) -optimal one. For the precise setting, we design the elimination-type algorithms and provide a fundamental lower bound which asymptotically matches the upper bound, while in the PAC setting, an UCB-type algorithm which amed \(\epsilon\) -RCB algorithm is proposed. We show that for all algorithms, the sample complexities, i.e., the pulling times for all arms, grow logarithmically as \(\frac{1}{\delta}\) increases. Moreover, compared to existing works, the running of our algorithms is independent of the arm-related parameters, which is more practical. Finally, we validate our theoretical results through numerical experiments.

Hyperbolic space based collaborative filtering has emerged as a popular topic in recommender systems. Compared to the euclidean space, hyperbolic space is more suitable to the tree-like structures in the user-item interactions and can achieve better recommender performance. Although some works have been devoted to this popular topic and made some progresses, they use tangent space as an approximation of hyperbolic space to implement model. Despite the effectiveness, such methods fail to fully exploit the advantages of hyperbolic space and still suffer from the data sparsity issue, which severely limits the recommender performance. To tackle these problems, we refer to the self-supervised learning technique and novelly propose aHyperbolic GraphContrastiveLearning (HyperCL) framework. Specifically, our framework encodes the augmentation views from both the tangent space and the hyperbolic space, and construct the contrast pairs based on their corresponding learned node representations. Our model not only leverages the geometric advantages of both sides but also achieves seamless information transmission between the two spaces. Extensive experimental results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model is highly competitive and outperforms leading baselines by considerable margins. Further experiments validate the robustness and the superiority of contrastive learning paradigm.