Cohesive Group Discovery in Interaction Graphs under Explicit Density Constraints
sigir26-018 · Full research paper · Yu Zhang, Yilong Luo, Mingyuan Ma, Yao Chen, Enqiang Zhu, Jin Xu, Chanjuan Liu
Social and Group Graph Recommendatio · 50% Cross-Domain and Social Graph Recomm · 50%
Abstract
Discovering cohesive groups is a fundamental primitive in graph-based recommender systems, underpinning tasks such as social recommendation, bundle discovery, and community-aware modeling. In interaction graphs, cohesion is often modeled as the γ-quasi-clique, an induced subgraph whose internal edge density meets a user-defined threshold γ. This formulation provides explicit control over within-group connectivity while accommodating the sparsity inherent in real-world data. However, ensuring explicit density constraints while maintaining robustness remains challenging for existing heuristic approaches. This paper presents EDQC, an effective framework for cohesive group discovery under explicit density constraints. EDQC leverages a lightweight energy diffusion process to rank vertices for localizing promising candidate regions. Guided by this ranking, the framework extracts and refines a candidate subgraph to ensure the output strictly satisfies the target density requirement. Extensive experiments on 75 real-world graphs across varying density thresholds demonstrate that EDQC identifies the largest mean γ-quasi-cliques in the vast majority of cases, achieving lower variance than the state-of-the-art methods while maintaining competitive runtime, making it a robust and practical solution for cohesive group discovery in graph-based recommender systems.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chen Wang 0052 | 55 | 86 Large-scale Personalized Video Game Recommendation via Social-aware Contextualized Graph Neural Network (2022) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 72 Ranking-based Group Identification via Factorized Attention on Social Tripartite Graph (2023) Social and Group Recommendation 72 Group-Aware Interest Disentangled Dual-Training for Personalized Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 2 | Mingdai Yang | 50 | 86 Ranking-based Group Identification via Factorized Attention on Social Tripartite Graph (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 86 Group-Aware Interest Disentangled Dual-Training for Personalized Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 86 Multi-View Graph Convolution for Participant Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation |
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| 3 | Xiaolong Liu 0012 | 50 | 86 Multi-View Graph Convolution for Participant Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 78 Ranking-based Group Identification via Factorized Attention on Social Tripartite Graph (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 73 Group-Aware Interest Disentangled Dual-Training for Personalized Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Recommendation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Weiming Liu 0005 | 39 |
Area-chair candidates (4)
| Weiming Liu 0005 assigned | 39 | 8 papers | |
| Leyu Lin | 39 | 15 papers | |
| Yanan Niu | 38 | 15 papers | |
| Qiaoyu Tan | 36 | 7 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chen Wang 0052 assigned | 55 | 3 | 86 Large-scale Personalized Video Game Recommendation via Social-aware Contextualized Graph Neural Network (2022) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 72 Ranking-based Group Identification via Factorized Attention on Social Tripartite Graph (2023) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 2 | Mingdai Yang assigned | 50 | 3 | 86 Ranking-based Group Identification via Factorized Attention on Social Tripartite Graph (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 86 Group-Aware Interest Disentangled Dual-Training for Personalized Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation |
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| 3 | Xiaolong Liu 0012 assigned | 50 | 3 | 86 Multi-View Graph Convolution for Participant Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 78 Ranking-based Group Identification via Factorized Attention on Social Tripartite Graph (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation |
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| 4 | Mengyuan Jing | 46 | 3 | 72 Multi-Interest Aware Graph Convolution Network for Social Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 72 MADM: A Model-agnostic Denoising Module for Graph-based Social Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 5 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 45 | 3 | 67 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation 48 Disentangled Contrastive Bundle Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 6 | Ke Wang 0038 | 43 | 3 | 57 Inter- and Intra-Domain Relation-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2022) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 52 Disentangled Contrastive Learning for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 7 | Lingling Yi | 42 | 3 | 86 Robust Preference-Guided Denoising for Graph based Social Recommendation (2023) Social and Group Graph Recommendation 60 Adaptive Graph Integration for Cross-Domain Recommendation via Heterogeneous Graph Coordinators (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 8 | Lianghao Xia | 42 | 3 | 48 GraphPro: Graph Pre-training and Prompt Learning for Recommendation (2024) Graph Pretraining and Foundation Models 47 Graph Masked Autoencoder for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 9 | Jianling Wang | 41 | 3 | 49 Session-based Recommendation with Hypergraph Attention Networks (2021) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 49 Next-item Recommendation with Sequential Hypergraphs (2020) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 10 | Dongxiao He | 41 | 3 | 48 HeterGP: Bridging Heterogeneity in Graph Neural Networks with Multi-View Prompting (2025) Graph Pretraining and Foundation Models 45 DuoKD: Dual Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Robust Graph Neural Networks (2026) Graph Pretraining and Foundation Models |
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| 11 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 41 | 3 | 62 Disentangled Contrastive Learning for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2023) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR 49 Graph Diffusion-Based Representation Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 12 | Fei Sun 0001 | 40 | 3 | 46 Multi-Behavior Sequential Modeling with Transition-Aware Graph Attention Network for E-Commerce Recommendation (2026) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 46 BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (2019) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation |
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| 13 | Yongjing Hao | 39 | 3 | 48 Edge-enhanced Global Disentangled Graph Neural Network for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 48 Multi-dimensional Graph Neural Network for Sequential Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 14 | Yixin Liu 0001 | 39 | 3 | 48 SpecG: A Spectral-Based Framework for Effective Graph Pretraining and Knowledge Transfer (2025) Graph Pretraining and Foundation Models 44 Noise-Resilient Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning via Multi-Hop Feature Quality Estimation (2024) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning |
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| 17 | Lantao Hu | 38 | 3 | 44 Comprehensive List Generation for Multi-Generator Reranking (2025) Recommendation with Search and Ranking 44 Unsupervised Ranking Ensemble Model for Recommendation (2024) Recommendation with Search and Ranking |
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| 18 | Hao Liu 0078 | 38 | 3 | 43 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment 38 MCRPL: A Pretrain, Prompt, and Fine-tune Paradigm for Non-overlapping Many-to-one Cross-domain Recommendation (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 19 | Bo Peng 0009 | 38 | 3 | 46 Modeling Sequences as Star Graphs to Address Over-Smoothing in Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation (2024) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation 46 Intention enhanced mixed attentive model for session-based recommendation (2024) Graph-Based Sequential and Session Recommendation |
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| 20 | Yi Zhang 0103 COI: co-author | 38 | 3 | 57 Heterogeneous Adaptive Preference Learning for Recommendation (2026) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 48 Bi-Directional Transfer Graph Contrastive Learning for Social Recommendation (2025) Social Media and User Modelling |
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| 22 | Xubin Ren | 38 | 3 | 50 Multi-auxiliary Augmented Collaborative Variational Auto-encoder for Tag Recommendation (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 48 A Survey of Large Language Models for Graphs (2024) Graph Pretraining and Foundation Models |
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| 23 | James Caverlee | 38 | 3 | 49 Session-based Recommendation with Hypergraph Attention Networks (2021) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 49 Next-item Recommendation with Sequential Hypergraphs (2020) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 24 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 37 | 3 | 42 MergeRec: Model Merging for Data-Isolated Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2026) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation 40 Linear Item-Item Models with Neural Knowledge for Session-based Recommendation (2025) Efficient and Long-Sequence Sequential Recommendation |
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| 25 | Yang Song 0008 | 37 | 3 | 48 Sequential Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks (2021) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 44 Mixed Attention Network for Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (2024) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 26 | Hyunsik Yoo | 37 | 3 | 44 Directed Network Embedding with Virtual Negative Edges (2022) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 42 Disentangling Degree-related Biases and Interest for Out-of-Distribution Generalized Directed Network Embedding (2023) Graph Anomaly and Out-of-Distribution Detection |
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| 27 | Jiangxia Cao | 37 | 3 | 44 Contrastive Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2022) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation 41 CDSRNP: Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation via Neural Process (2025) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation |
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| 29 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 36 | 3 | 47 Enhancing Graph Contrastive Learning with Reliable and Informative Augmentation for Recommendation (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 40 Enhancing Sequential Recommender with Large Language Models for Joint Video and Comment Recommendation (2025) Sequential and Session-based Recommendation |
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| 30 | Wei Wei 0027 | 36 | 3 | 46 Multi-Relational Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 45 Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 31 | Jiancan Wu | 36 | 3 | 47 Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation (2021) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 43 Graph convolution machine for context-aware recommender system (2022) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning |
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| 32 | Bo Chen 0023 | 36 | 3 | 46 Compressed Interaction Graph based Framework for Multi-behavior Recommendation (2023) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation 40 How Can Recommender Systems Benefit from Large Language Models: A Survey (2025) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 33 | Min Hou 0004 | 36 | 3 | 44 Pre-training General User Representation with Multi-type APP Behaviors (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 42 WeaveRec: An LLM-Based Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation Framework with Model Merging (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 34 | Riwei Lai COI: co-author | 36 | 3 | 45 Proxy-Aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2023) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation 44 Proxy-enhanced cross-domain sequential recommendation (2025) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |