Mind Individual Information! Principal Graph Learning for Multimedia Recommendation

Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based methods have recently emerged as effective approaches for multimedia recommendation. Typically, these methods employ message passing on the user-item interaction graph, and model user preferences by exploiting co-occurrence patterns. Despite their effectiveness, we argue that they insufficiently exploit the individual information, potentially limiting recommendation performance. To validate our argument, we first analyze existing methods from spectral graph theory. We identify that existing methods focus on capturing global structural features, but underutilize local structural features that convey individual information. Further detailed experiments reveal that such an underutilization leads to overly similar user preferences modeling. Furthermore, we propose a novel Principal Graph Learning (PGL) framework to address this issue. The idea is to enhance user preference modeling by effectively mining and utilizing principal local structural features. PGL first extracts the principal subgraph from the user-item interaction graph using two novel extraction operators: global-aware and local-aware subgraph extraction. It then employs message passing on the principal subgraph to comprehensively model user perference, with the aim of simultaneously capturing co-occurrence patterns and individual information. Compared to existing methods, PGL achieves an average performance improvement of 9%.