{"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/unifying-graph-convolution-and-contrastive","title":"Unifying Graph Convolution and Contrastive Learning in Collaborative Filtering","arxiv_id":"2406.13996","date":"2024-06-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yihong Wu","Le Zhang","Fengran Mo","Tianyu Zhu","Weizhi Ma","Jian-Yun Nie"],"abstract":"Graph-based models and contrastive learning have emerged as prominent methods in Collaborative Filtering (CF). While many existing models in CF incorporate these methods in their design, there seems to be a limited depth of analysis regarding the foundational principles behind them. This paper bridges graph convolution, a pivotal element of graph-based models, with contrastive learning through a theoretical framework. By examining the learning dynamics and equilibrium of the contrastive loss, we offer a fresh lens to understand contrastive learning via graph theory, emphasizing its capability to capture high-order connectivity. Building on this analysis, we further show that the graph convolutional layers often used in graph-based models are not essential for high-order connectivity modeling and might contribute to the risk of oversmoothing. Stemming from our findings, we introduce Simple Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (SCCF), a simple and effective algorithm based on a naive embedding model and a modified contrastive loss. The efficacy of the algorithm is demonstrated through extensive experiments across four public datasets. The experiment code is available at \\url{https://github.com/wu1hong/SCCF}. \\end{abstract}","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.13996v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.13996v2.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":"unifying-graph-convolution-and-contrastive","repo_url":"https://github.com/wu1hong/sccf","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"collaborative-filtering","task_name":"Collaborative Filtering"},{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"contrastive-learning","method_name":"Contrastive Learning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}