TAMER: Interest Tree Augmented Modality Graph Recommender for Multimodal Recommendation

Multimodal recommender systems enhance recommendation performance by integrating information from different modalities (e.g., text and images). A common approach is to link items with high modality similarity in modality graphs, helping users explore their interests more broadly. However, existing methods often introduce noise when enhancing modality graphs, making it challenging to effectively balance performance and accuracy. To address this issue, we propose an Interest Tree Augmented Modality Graph RecommendER for Multimodal Recommendation (TAMER). In this framework, we first redistribute item modality features using various component analysis methods to ensure more reliable item similarity within modality graphs. Next, we construct interest graphs based on reliable semantic relationships and prune the interest graphs into multiple interest trees. These interest trees are then applied to the multimodal item-item homogeneous graph to extend potential links within the modality homogeneous graph. The interest tree-based enhancement method effectively captures high-order relationships in the modality graph while avoiding noisy links. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets. Compared with the strongest baseline methods, our method achieves an average improvement of 9.98% across four evaluation metrics. The source code is available at https://github.com/Z-last-ONE/TAMER.