Hypercomplex Prompt-aware Multimodal Recommendation

TL;DR

HPMRec is a novel multimodal recommendation framework that employs hypercomplex embeddings and prompt-aware mechanisms to improve feature representation, model nonlinear cross-modality interactions, and mitigate over-smoothing, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Contribution

The paper introduces HPMRec, a hypercomplex embedding-based model with prompt-aware and self-supervised learning components for enhanced multimodal recommendation.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance on four datasets.

Effectively models nonlinear cross-modality interactions.

Alleviates over-smoothing in graph convolutional networks.

Abstract

Modern recommender systems face critical challenges in handling information overload while addressing the inherent limitations of multimodal representation learning. Existing methods suffer from three fundamental limitations: (1) restricted ability to represent rich multimodal features through a single representation, (2) existing linear modality fusion strategies ignore the deep nonlinear correlations between modalities, and (3) static optimization methods failing to dynamically mitigate the over-smoothing problem in graph convolutional network (GCN). To overcome these limitations, we propose HPMRec, a novel Hypercomplex Prompt-aware Multimodal Recommendation framework, which utilizes hypercomplex embeddings in the form of multi-components to enhance the representation diversity of multimodal features. HPMRec adopts the hypercomplex multiplication to naturally establish nonlinear cross-modality interactions to bridge semantic gaps, which is beneficial to explore the cross-modality features. HPMRec also introduces the prompt-aware compensation mechanism to aid the misalignment between components and modality-specific features loss, and this mechanism fundamentally alleviates the over-smoothing problem. It further designs self-supervised learning tasks that enhance representation diversity and align different modalities. Extensive experiments on four public datasets show that HPMRec achieves state-of-the-art recommendation performance.