C-HyPOD: Causal Hyperbolic Representation Learning with Prototype Orthogonal Disentanglement for Graph Out-of-Distribution Recommendation

The vulnerability of graph-based recommender systems to spurious correlations has become a significant obstacle to their practical deployment, hindering their robustness in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. While existing approaches offer partial solutions, they are limited by fundamental shortcomings: model-centric approaches reliant on predefined causal graphs often suffer from suboptimal performance due to complex and dynamic environmental influences. These methods typically require identifying an environmental label or performing feature decoupling, but hidden environments are often difficult to model. Furthermore, existing general feature decoupling methods fail to account for the unique structural characteristics of graphs. To overcome these challenges, we advocate for a shift towards explicit, geometrically-grounded disentanglement. Hyperbolic geometry is particularly suited for this task due to its capacity to model the inherent hierarchies of user interests. We introduce C-HyPOD : Causal Hyperbolic Representation Learning with Prototype Orthogonal Disentanglement, a novel framework designed for graph-based OOD recommendation. Unlike traditional methods, C-HyPOD transforms disentanglement into a concrete geometric task. It introduces a global interest space by learning a single set of universal interest prototypes. They provides a superior geometric foundation for ensuring these prototypes are well-separated and semantically distinct. To ensure a complete separation and prevent information leakage, a targeted orthogonality constraint is then applied. This constraint purifies the aggregated causal representation by forcing it to be orthogonal to the spurious representation in the tangent space, thereby eliminating their linear correlation. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that C-HyPOD significantly improves OOD robustness and recommendation performance, surpassing state-of-the-art methods.