InfoDCL: Informative Noise Enhanced Diffusion Based Contrastive Learning

TL;DR

InfoDCL introduces a diffusion-based contrastive learning framework that enhances recommender systems by integrating semantic information into contrastive views, leading to significant performance improvements over existing methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel diffusion-based contrastive learning approach that incorporates semantic information and a collaborative training strategy for better recommendation accuracy.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on five datasets.

Effectively integrates semantic information into contrastive views.

Uses higher-order co-occurrence info during inference for improved results.

Abstract

Contrastive learning has demonstrated promising potential in recommender systems. Existing methods typically construct sparser views by randomly perturbing the original interaction graph, as they have no idea about the authentic user preferences. Owing to the sparse nature of recommendation data, this paradigm can only capture insufficient semantic information. To address the issue, we propose InfoDCL, a novel diffusion-based contrastive learning framework for recommendation. Rather than injecting randomly sampled Gaussian noise, we employ a single-step diffusion process that integrates noise with auxiliary semantic information to generate signals and feed them to the standard diffusion process to generate authentic user preferences as contrastive views. Besides, based on a comprehensive analysis of the mutual influence between generation and preference learning in InfoDCL, we build a collaborative training objective strategy to transform the interference between them into mutual collaboration. Additionally, we employ multiple GCN layers only during inference stage to incorporate higher-order co-occurrence information while maintaining training efficiency. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that InfoDCL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our InfoDCL offers an effective solution for enhancing recommendation performance and suggests a novel paradigm for applying diffusion method in contrastive learning frameworks.