Graph neural network-based recommenders employ the aggregation paradigms to learn node representation from higher-order neighboring nodes within the graph. However, these simple aggregation paradigms may perform poorly when mitigating noise impacts and capturing complex user preferences. To address it, some studies have attempted to enhance representation through contrastive augmentation across different views. Despite some effectiveness, the simple-view contrasts are still suboptimal with some unresolved challenges: (1) the influence of multivariate noise in interaction data, (2) knowledge biases introduced by irrelevant connections, and (3) user’s multiple interests. In this work, we propose a novel method named Diffusion-Based Relation Augmentation for Knowledge-aware Recommendation (DRAR) to overcome the above challenges. First, we alleviate the impact of interaction noise by injecting uncertainty and generating preference distributions with a diffusion-based module. Next, we design a relation augmentation module to effectively capture user neighborhood-level and context-level enhanced representations to alleviate the knowledge bias of irrelevant connections. Furthermore, we design a collaborative alignment module that enhances the model’s robustness by aligning user representation views at different stages. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets consistently demonstrate the superiority of our model over the state-of-the-art approaches. Our model demonstrates average improvements of 6.78% in Recall and 7.38% in NDCG across all datasets.

The mainstream approach of GNN-based recommendation aggregates high-order ID information associated with the node in the user-item graph. The aggregation pattern using ID as signal has two disadvantages: lack of textual semantics and the impact of interaction noise. These disadvantages pose a threat to effectively learn user preferences, especially in capturing intricate user-item semantic relationships. Although large language models (LLMs) allow the integration of rich textual information into recommenders and have had groundbreaking applications in recommender systems, current works need to bridge the gap between different representation spaces. This is because LLM-based methods align the representations of GNN-based models only by using text embedding of LLM, leading to unsatisfactory results. To address this challenge, we propose a denoising alignment framework with LLMs for GNN-based recommenders (DALR) , which aims to align structural representation with textual representation and mitigate the effects of noise. Specifically, we propose a modeling framework that integrates the representation of graph structure with textual information from LLMs to capture intricate user-item interactions. We also suggest an alignment paradigm to enhance representation performance by aligning semantic signals from LLMs and structural features from GNN models. Additionally, we introduce a contrastive learning scheme to relieve the impact of noise and improve model performance. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. DALR achieves improvements ranging from 2.82% to 12.20% in Recall@5 and from 1.04% to 3.48% in NDCG@5 compared to the strongest baseline model, using the Steam dataset as an example.