Breaking Information Cocoons: A Hyperbolic Framework for Balancing Exploration and Exploitation in Recommender Systems

Modern recommender systems often create information cocoons, restricting users' exposure to diverse content. The central challenge is to balance content exploration and exploitation while allowing users to adjust their recommendation preferences. Ideally, this balance can be captured with a hierarchical representation, where depth search facilitates exploitation and breadth search enables exploration. However, existing approaches face two fundamental limitations: Euclidean methods struggle to capture hierarchical structures, while hyperbolic methods, despite their superior hierarchical modeling, lack semantic understanding of user and item profiles and fail to provide a principled mechanism for balancing exploration and exploitation. To address these challenges, we propose HERec, a hyperbolic framework that effectively balances exploration and exploitation in recommender systems. Our framework introduces two key innovations: (1) a semantic-enhanced hierarchical mechanism that aligns rich textual descriptions with collaborative information directly in hyperbolic space. Theoretical gradient analysis demonstrates that this alignment effectively leverages the underlying hyperbolic manifold structure, resulting in more accurate modeling of users and items; (2) an automatic hierarchical clustering mechanism by optimizing Dasgupta's cost, which discovers hierarchical structures without requiring predefined hyperparameters, enabling user-adjustable exploration-exploitation trade-offs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HERec consistently outperforms both Euclidean and hyperbolic baselines, achieving up to 5.49% improvement in utility metrics and 11.39% increase in diversity metrics, effectively mitigating information cocoons.