From Criteria to Ranking: Targeting-Aware Tripartite Graph Learning for Multi-Criteria Recommendation

Multi-criteria recommender systems (MCRSs) are becoming increasingly important in the Web ecosystem, where platforms such as e-commerce sites and review portals allow users to evaluate items from multiple perspectives. By leveraging criterion-level ratings rather than relying solely on overall scores, MCRSs can enhance personalization and more accurately capture user preferences. However, existing multi-criteria recommendation methods often fail to explicitly model user-specific preferences across criteria or to incorporate item–criterion signals into representation learning. To solve these problems, we propose TaTriGR, a Targeting-Aware Tripartite Graph Recommender, which jointly models user–item–criterion interactions in a unified tripartite graph and integrates user-specific criterion weights through targeting mechanisms. Specifically, TaTriGR encodes user–criterion targeting through personalized weights, while incorporating item–criterion performance as an additional channel to enrich item semantics. A lightweight propagation mechanism then diffuses information across the tripartite structure, and a formal score decomposition shows that predictions satisfy fundamental multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) properties. To further reinforce targeting, TaTriGR introduces two auxiliary objectives: Ideal Point Distillation and Lexicographic Consistency, which encourage criterion-consistent user representations and rankings. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TaTriGR, showing relative gains up to 16.1% over the best baseline models. Our implementations are available at https://github.com/nunu1995/TaTriGR.