Bidirectional Counterfactual Distillation for Review-Based Recommendation

Review-based recommendation methods typically integrate multiple behaviors, including interactions, reviews, and ratings, to model user preferences. To effectively extract preference signals from diverse behaviors, some studies train multiple student models to capture distinct behavioral patterns, and leverage online distillation to facilitate collaborative learning among them. However, we argue that these techniques suffer from bias contamination from rating distributions and feature homogenization during cross-behavior knowledge transfer: (1) Rating distribution bias, arising from non-uniform historical ratings, propagates across behaviors through distillation, contaminating the true preference representations of other behaviors. (2) Static distillation strategies often lead to homogenized behavioral features, hindering the learning of behavior-specific preferences. To address these issues, we propose a novel Bidirectional Counterfactual Distillation (Bi-CoD) framework for review-based recommendation. In Bi-CoD, we first design an adversarial counterfactual distillation module to suppress the impact of non-uniform rating distributions on distillation, thereby preventing it from contaminating the user's true preference representations across behaviors. Subsequently, we introduce a stage-aware bidirectional distillation strategy to enhance the distinctiveness of behavioral features, facilitating the effective learning of behavior-specific preferences. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.