Self-Supervised Hypergraph Learning for Knowledge-Aware Social Recommendation

Abstract

Social recommendations typically utilize social relationships and past behaviors to predict users’ preferences. In real-world scenarios, the connections between users and items often extend beyond simple pairwise relationships. Leveraging hypergraphs to capture high-order relationships provides a novel perspective to social recommendation. However, effectively modeling these high-order relationships is challenging due to limited external knowledge and noisy feedback. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework called self-supervised hypergraph learning for knowledge-aware social recommendation (SHLKR). In SHLKR, we incorporated three main types of connections: behavior, social, and attribute context relationships. These dependencies serve as the basis for defining hyperedges in the hypergraphs. A dual-channel hypergraph structure is created based on these relationships. Then, the hypergraph convolution is applied to model the high-order interactions between users and items. Additionally, we adopted a self-supervised learning task to maximize the consistency between different views. It helps to mitigate the model’s sensitivity to noisy feedback. We evaluated the performance of SHLKR through extensive experiments on publicly available datasets. The results demonstrate that leveraging hypergraphs for modeling can better capture the complexity and diversity of user preferences and interactions.