Social Recommendation Based on Multi-Auxiliary Information Constrastive Learning

Abstract

Social recommendation can effectively alleviate the problems of data sparseness and the cold start of recommendation systems, attracting widespread attention from researchers and industry. Current social recommendation models use social relations to alleviate the problem of data sparsity and improve recommendation performance. Although self-supervised learning based on user–item interaction can enhance the performance of such models, multi-auxiliary information is neglected in the learning process. Therefore, we propose a model based on self-supervision and multi-auxiliary information using multi-auxiliary information, such as user social relationships and item association relationships, to make recommendations. Specifically, the user social relationship and item association relationship are combined to form a multi-auxiliary information graph. The user–item interaction relationship is also integrated into the same heterogeneous graph so that multiple pieces of information can be spread in the same graph. In addition, we utilize the graph convolution method to learn user and item embeddings, whereby the user embeddings reflect both user–item interaction and user social relationships, and the item embeddings reflect user–item interaction and item association relationships. We also design multi-view self-supervising auxiliary tasks based on the constructed multi-auxiliary views. Signals generated by self-supervised auxiliary tasks can alleviate the problem of data sparsity, further improving user/item embedding quality and recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on two public datasets verify the superiority of the proposed model.