Fusion Self-supervised Learning for Recommendation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel fusion self-supervised learning framework for recommendation systems that leverages high-order graph information and multiple contrastive learning objectives to improve performance and efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a new SSL framework that avoids data augmentation and fuses multiple CL signals using high-order GCN information, enhancing recommendation accuracy.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three datasets

Demonstrates improved recommendation accuracy and efficiency

Effectively fuses multiple contrastive learning signals

Abstract

Recommender systems are widely deployed in various web environments, and self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently attracted significant attention in this field. Contrastive learning (CL) stands out as a major SSL paradigm due to its robust ability to generate self-supervised signals. Mainstream graph contrastive learning (GCL)-based methods typically implement CL by creating contrastive views through various data augmentation techniques. Despite these methods are effective, we argue that there still exist several challenges. i) Data augmentation ($e.g.,$ discarding edges or adding noise) necessitates additional graph convolution (GCN) or modeling operations, which are highly time-consuming and potentially harm the embedding quality. ii) Existing CL-based methods use traditional CL objectives to capture self-supervised signals. However, few studies have explored obtaining CL objectives from more perspectives and have attempted to fuse the varying signals from these CL objectives to enhance recommendation performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Fusion Self-supervised Learning framework for recommendation. Specifically, instead of facilitating data augmentations, we use high-order information from GCN process to create contrastive views. Additionally, to integrate self-supervised signals from various CL objectives, we propose an advanced CL objective. By ensuring that positive pairs are distanced from negative samples derived from both contrastive views, we effectively fuse self-supervised signals from distinct CL objectives, thereby enhancing the mutual information between positive pairs. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate the superior recommendation performance and efficiency of HFGCL compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.