Contrastive Flow Matching for Collaborative Filtering
Abstract
Flow Matching (FM) has recently been introduced into generative collaborative filtering due to its potential to capture user preferences. However, existing FM-based methods are often trained with only the standard regression objective in flow matching and lack explicit inter-user supervision. This can drive the model toward an averaged preference pattern and generate indistinguishable predictions across users. A natural remedy is to introduce contrastive learning for inter-user separation, yet naive designs face two challenges: (1) In FM-based collaborative filtering, the output is a user's predicted interaction scores over items. Applying contrastive learning directly on this output forces different users to be separated even when they share the same preferences, leading to false repulsion. (2) Flow matching is highly sensitive to its input, so input-level perturbations for view construction can change the generated outcome, making positive pairs semantically mismatched. To address these issues, we propose CoFlowCF, a contrastive flow matching framework for collaborative filtering. Specifically, CoFlowCF introduces hidden contrastive learning by applying inter-user constraints before the flow model's final outputs. We decompose the flow model into a flow encoder and a prediction head, and apply contrastive regularization to the encoder output representations to avoid false repulsion in the prediction space. To build semantically consistent views, we keep the input unchanged and use independent dropout inside the encoder instead of input-level perturbations. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that CoFlowCF consistently improves recommendation performance and robustness. The code is available at https://github.com/DevByQian/CoFlowCF.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 | 60 | 79 Disentangled Contrastive Bundle Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 53 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation 41 Multi-view Semantic Contrastive Alignment for Multimodal Recommendation (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 2 | Lantao Hu | 54 | 74 MODEM: Decoupling User Behavior for Shared-Account Video Recommendations on Large Screen Devices (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 73 Soft Contrastive Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 70 Distinguished Quantized Guidance for Diffusion-based Sequence Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 3 | Mingdai Yang | 45 | 70 Collaborative Alignment for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 67 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 53 Group Identification via Transitional Hypergraph Convolution with Cross-view Self-supervised Learning (2023) Social and Group Recommendation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Leyu Lin | 48 |
Area-chair candidates (3)
| Leyu Lin assigned | 48 | 15 papers | |
| Weiming Liu 0005 COI: co-author | 45 | 8 papers | |
| Kun Gai | 44 | 5 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jiuqiang Li 0002 assigned | 60 | 3 | 79 Disentangled Contrastive Bundle Recommendation with Conditional Diffusion (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 53 Graph Diffusive Self-Supervised Learning for Social Recommendation (2024) Social and Group Recommendation |
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| 2 | Zhengyi Yang 0007 | 55 | 3 | 65 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 65 On Efficiency-Effectiveness Trade-off of Diffusion-based Recommenders (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 3 | Ke Wang 0038 | 55 | 3 | 65 Contrastive Self-supervised Learning in Recommender Systems: A Survey (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 63 LLM-Grounded Diffusion for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 4 | Lianghao Xia | 54 | 3 | 69 Automated Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 69 LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 5 | Lantao Hu assigned | 54 | 3 | 74 MODEM: Decoupling User Behavior for Shared-Account Video Recommendations on Large Screen Devices (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 73 Soft Contrastive Sequential Recommendation (2024) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 6 | Mengyuan Jing | 51 | 3 | 76 Interest-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation With Diffusion-Based Augmentation (2026) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 67 Generating Difficulty-aware Negative Samples via Conditional Diffusion for Multi-modal Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 7 | Yi Zhang 0103 | 50 | 3 | 69 Unveiling Contrastive Learning's Capability of Neighborhood Aggregation for Collaborative Filtering (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 69 MixRec: Individual and Collective Mixing Empowers Data Augmentation for Recommender Systems (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 8 | Jiancan Wu | 49 | 3 | 69 Generate What You Prefer: Reshaping Sequential Recommendation via Guided Diffusion (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 69 Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation (2021) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 9 | Yongjing Hao COI: co-author | 48 | 3 | 66 Meta-Optimized Joint Generative and Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 58 LMACL: Improving Graph Collaborative Filtering with Learnable Model Augmentation Contrastive Learning (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 10 | Bowen Zheng 0005 | 48 | 3 | 69 Enhancing Graph Contrastive Learning with Reliable and Informative Augmentation for Recommendation (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 49 Generative Recommender with End-to-End Learnable Item Tokenization (2025) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 12 | Min Hou 0004 | 48 | 3 | 72 Pre-training General User Representation with Multi-type APP Behaviors (2024) Recommendation Systems and Evaluation 70 Unified Representation Learning for Discrete Attribute Enhanced Completely Cold-Start Recommendation (2025) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 13 | Xiaolong Liu 0012 | 47 | 3 | 71 Collaborative Alignment for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 67 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning |
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| 14 | Shuchang Liu 0001 | 47 | 3 | 73 Fading to Grow: Growing Preference Ratios via Preference Fading Discrete Diffusion for Recommendation (2025) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 66 Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks (2024) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders |
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| 15 | Chen Wang 0052 | 47 | 3 | 67 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning 48 Confidence-Aware Fine-Tuning of Sequential Recommendation Systems Via Conformal Prediction (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation |
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| 16 | Chunyang Wang 0001 | 46 | 3 | 57 Review-Enhanced Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 52 Guiding Graph Learning with Denoised Modality for Multi-modal Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 17 | Lichan Hong | 46 | 3 | 65 Self-supervised Learning for Large-scale Item Recommendations (2021) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 50 Better Generalization with Semantic IDs: A Case Study in Ranking for Recommendations (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 18 | Wei Wei 0027 | 46 | 3 | 65 Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 62 DiffMM: Multi-Modal Diffusion Model for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 19 | Yong He 0009 | 46 | 3 | 65 Global-Aware Model-Free Self-distillation for Recommendation System (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 45 Breaking the Length Barrier: LLM-Enhanced CTR Prediction in Long Textual User Behaviors (2024) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 20 | Ed H. Chi | 46 | 3 | 65 Self-supervised Learning for Large-scale Item Recommendations (2021) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 50 Better Generalization with Semantic IDs: A Case Study in Ranking for Recommendations (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 21 | Jiangxia Cao | 46 | 3 | 70 From Agnostic to Specific: Latent Preference Diffusion for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 49 Contrastive Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2022) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 22 | Riwei Lai | 46 | 3 | 72 Disentangled Negative Sampling for Collaborative Filtering (2023) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 49 Proxy-Aware Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2023) Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation |
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| 23 | Xubin Ren | 46 | 3 | 81 Multi-auxiliary Augmented Collaborative Variational Auto-encoder for Tag Recommendation (2023) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 54 EasyRec: Simple yet Effective Language Models for Recommendation (2025) Collaborative-Semantic Representation Alignment |
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| 24 | Hao Liu 0078 | 45 | 3 | 47 Mitigating Distribution Shifts in Sequential Recommendation: An Invariance Perspective (2025) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 47 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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| 25 | Qiang Luo 0004 | 45 | 3 | 61 DiffGRM: Diffusion-based Generative Recommendation Model (2026) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 47 OneLoc: Geo-Aware Generative Recommender Systems for Local Life Service (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 26 | Xuanhua Yang | 45 | 3 | 73 Towards Personalized Bundle Creative Generation with Contrastive Non-Autoregressive Decoding (2022) Diffusion and Flow Recommenders 45 Hierarchical User Long-term Behavior Modeling for Click-Through Rate Prediction (2025) CTR and Conversion Rate Prediction |
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| 27 | Jianling Wang | 45 | 3 | 48 Learning to Augment for Casual User Recommendation (2022) Contrastive and Self-Supervised Sequential Recommendation 47 Session-based Recommendation with Hypergraph Attention Networks (2021) Sequential and Session-Based Graph Recommendation |
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| 28 | Mingdai Yang assigned | 45 | 3 | 70 Collaborative Alignment for Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 67 Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation (2023) Graph-based User and Item Representation Learning |
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| 30 | Seongmin Park 0002 | 45 | 3 | 58 uCTRL: Unbiased Contrastive Representation Learning via Alignment and Uniformity for Collaborative Filtering (2023) Popularity Bias and Debiasing in Recommendation 46 MergeRec: Model Merging for Data-Isolated Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation (2026) Cross-Domain and Cross-Market Sequential Recommendation |
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| 31 | Yinwei Wei | 45 | 3 | 57 MultiCBR: Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Bundle Recommendation (2024) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning 55 MMGCN: Multi-modal Graph Convolution Network for Personalized Recommendation of Micro-video (2019) Graph Contrastive and Self-Supervised Learning |
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| 32 | Jieming Zhu | 45 | 3 | 50 UNGER: Generative Recommendation with A Unified Code via Semantic and Collaborative Integration (2026) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs 50 CoST: Contrastive Quantization based Semantic Tokenization for Generative Recommendation (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |