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MixGCF: An Improved Training Method for Graph Neural Network-based Recommender Systems

Published: 14 August 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently emerged as state-of-the-art collaborative filtering (CF) solution. A fundamental challenge of CF is to distill negative signals from the implicit feedback, but negative sampling in GNN-based CF has been largely unexplored. In this work, we propose to study negative sampling by leveraging both the user-item graph structure and GNNs' aggregation process. We present the MixGCF method---a general negative sampling plugin that can be directly used to train GNN-based recommender systems. In MixGCF, rather than sampling raw negatives from data, we design the hop mixing technique to synthesize hard negatives. Specifically, the idea of hop mixing is to generate the synthetic negative by aggregating embeddings from different layers of raw negatives' neighborhoods. The layer and neighborhood selection process are optimized by a theoretically-backed hard selection strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that by using MixGCF, state-of-the-art GNN-based recommendation models can be consistently and significantly improved, e.g., 26% for NGCF and 22% for LightGCN in terms of NDCG@20.

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Presentation Video on KDD2021: MixGCF: An Improved Training Method for Graph Neural Network-based Recommender Systems

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  • (2025)Exploration and Exploitation of Hard Negative Samples for Cross-Domain Sequential RecommendationProceedings of the Eighteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3701551.3703535(669-677)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2025
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cover image ACM Conferences
KDD '21: Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining
August 2021
4259 pages
ISBN:9781450383325
DOI:10.1145/3447548
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 14 August 2021

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Author Tags

  1. collaborative filtering
  2. graph neural networks
  3. negative sampling
  4. recommender systems

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  • National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars
  • National Natural ScienceFoundation of China Key Program

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  • (2025)SCONE: A Novel Stochastic Sampling to Generate Contrastive Views and Hard Negative Samples for RecommendationProceedings of the Eighteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3701551.3703522(419-428)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2025
  • (2025)Effective Hard Negative Mining for Contrastive Learning-Based Code SearchACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/369599434:3(1-35)Online publication date: 23-Feb-2025
  • (2025)Textual Graph Contrastive Learning for Enhanced Dataset Recommendation2025 19th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication (IMCOM)10.1109/IMCOM64595.2025.10857584(1-4)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2025
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  • (2024)SSGCL: Simple Social Recommendation with Graph Contrastive LearningMathematics10.3390/math1207110712:7(1107)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2024
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