HRCF: Enhancing Collaborative Filtering via Hyperbolic Geometric Regularization

TL;DR

This paper introduces HRCF, a hyperbolic regularization method for collaborative filtering that leverages hyperbolic space properties to improve embedding quality and recommendation accuracy in large-scale, scale-free networks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel hyperbolic regularizer with geometric-aware design, addressing over-smoothing and enhancing discriminative ability in hyperbolic embeddings for recommender systems.

Findings

Outperforms Euclidean and hyperbolic baselines on benchmark datasets.

Effectively mitigates over-smoothing in hyperbolic embedding aggregation.

Achieves state-of-the-art recommendation performance.

Abstract

In large-scale recommender systems, the user-item networks are generally scale-free or expand exponentially. The latent features (also known as embeddings) used to describe the user and item are determined by how well the embedding space fits the data distribution. Hyperbolic space offers a spacious room to learn embeddings with its negative curvature and metric properties, which can well fit data with tree-like structures. Recently, several hyperbolic approaches have been proposed to learn high-quality representations for the users and items. However, most of them concentrate on developing the hyperbolic similitude by designing appropriate projection operations, whereas many advantageous and exciting geometric properties of hyperbolic space have not been explicitly explored. For example, one of the most notable properties of hyperbolic space is that its capacity space increases exponentially with the radius, which indicates the area far away from the hyperbolic origin is much more embeddable. Regarding the geometric properties of hyperbolic space, we bring up a Hyperbolic Regularization powered Collaborative Filtering(HRCF) and design a geometric-aware hyperbolic regularizer. Specifically, the proposal boosts optimization procedure via the root alignment and origin-aware penalty, which is simple yet impressively effective. Through theoretical analysis, we further show that our proposal is able to tackle the over-smoothing problem caused by hyperbolic aggregation and also brings the models a better discriminative ability. We conduct extensive empirical analysis, comparing our proposal against a large set of baselines on several public benchmarks. The empirical results show that our approach achieves highly competitive performance and surpasses both the leading Euclidean and hyperbolic baselines by considerable margins.