Sub-Interest-Aware Representation Uniformity for Recommender System

In today’s information-rich era, users rely heavily on recommender systems to identify relevant content. Graph structures, renowned for their ability to model intricate user-content relationships, have become essential to these systems. However, the accuracy of recommendations hinges critically on the quality of node representations within these graphs. Personalized recommendations strive to enhance uniqueness by maximizing the dissimilarity between representations (known as uniformity) while simultaneously ensuring that the representations align closely with the content users engage with (dubbed as alignment). Nevertheless, balancing these conflicting objectives remains a challenge for optimal recommendation performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose an innovative approach called SIURec, which differs significantly from previous studies. Rather than relying on manual weight selection between uniformity and alignment and optimizing uniformity solely on the final representation, SIURec adopts an adaptive adjustment method that learns the optimal weight between uniformity and alignment automatically. By optimizing uniformity at every convolutional layer, SIURec captures users’ sub-interests more effectively, ultimately leading to improved recommendation accuracy. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that SIURec achieves superior learning of uniformity (with an average improvement of 4.26% in accuracy compared to eleven SOTA methods) and exhibits robustness across different hyperparameter settings.