{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/graph-based-alignment-and-uniformity-for","title":"Graph-based Alignment and Uniformity for Recommendation","arxiv_id":"2308.09292","date":"2023-08-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Liangwei Yang","Zhiwei Liu","Chen Wang","Mingdai Yang","Xiaolong Liu","Jing Ma","Philip S. Yu"],"abstract":"Collaborative filtering-based recommender systems (RecSys) rely on learning representations for users and items to predict preferences accurately. Representation learning on the hypersphere is a promising approach due to its desirable properties, such as alignment and uniformity. However, the sparsity issue arises when it encounters RecSys. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, graph-based alignment and uniformity (GraphAU), that explicitly considers high-order connectivities in the user-item bipartite graph. GraphAU aligns the user/item embedding to the dense vector representations of high-order neighbors using a neighborhood aggregator, eliminating the need to compute the burdensome alignment to high-order neighborhoods individually. To address the discrepancy in alignment losses, GraphAU includes a layer-wise alignment pooling module to integrate alignment losses layer-wise. Experiments on four datasets show that GraphAU significantly alleviates the sparsity issue and achieves state-of-the-art performance. We open-source GraphAU at https://github.com/YangLiangwei/GraphAU.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.09292v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.09292v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"graph-based-alignment-and-uniformity-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/yangliangwei/graphau","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"collaborative-filtering","task_name":"Collaborative Filtering"},{"task_slug":"recommendation-systems","task_name":"Recommendation Systems"},{"task_slug":"representation-learning","task_name":"Representation Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}