Graph Augmentation Empowered Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

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The application of contrastive learning (CL) to collaborative filtering (CF) in recommender systems has achieved remarkable success. CL-based recommendation models mainly focus on creating multiple augmented views by employing different graph augmentation methods and utilizing these views for self-supervised learning. However, current CL methods for recommender systems usually struggle to fully address the problem of noisy data. To address this problem, we propose the G raph A ugmentation E mpowered C ontrastive L earning (GAECL) for recommendation framework, which uses graph augmentation based on topological and semantic dual adaptation and global co-modeling via structural optimization to co-create contrasting views for better augmentation of the CF paradigm. Specifically, we strictly filter out unimportant topologies by reconstructing the adjacency matrix and mask unimportant attributes in nodes according to the PageRank centrality principle to generate an augmented view that filters out noisy data. Additionally, GAECL achieves global collaborative modeling through structural optimization and generates another augmented view based on the PageRank centrality principle. This helps to filter the noisy data while preserving the original semantics of the data for more effective data augmentation. Extensive experiments are conducted on five datasets to demonstrate the superior performance of our model over various recommendation models.