Asymmetrical Context-aware Modulation for Collaborative Filtering Recommendation

Modern learnable collaborative filtering recommendation models generate user and item representations by deep learning methods (e.g. graph neural networks) for modeling user-item interactions. However, most of them may still have unsatisfied performances due to two issues. Firstly, some models assume that the representations of users or items are fixed when modeling interactions with different objects. However, a user may have different interests in different items, and an item may also have different attractions to different users. Thus the representations of users and items should depend on their contexts to some extent. Secondly, existing models learn representations for user and item by symmetrical dual methods which have identical or similar operations. Symmetrical methods may fail to sufficiently and reasonably extract the features of user and item as their interaction data have diverse semantic properties. To address the above issues, a novel model called Asymmetrical context-awaRe modulation for collaBorative filtering REcommendation (ARBRE) is proposed. It adopts simplified GNNs on collaborative graphs to capture homogeneous user preferences and item attributes, then designs two asymmetrical context-aware modulation models to learn dynamic user interests and item attractions, respectively. The learned representations from user domain and item domain are input pair-wisely into 4 Multi-Layer Perceptrons in different combinations to model user-item interactions. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of ARBRE over various state-of-the-arts.