Variational Graph Auto-Encoder Driven Graph Enhancement for Sequential Recommendation
Variational Graph Auto-Encoder Driven Graph Enhancement for Sequential Recommendation
Yuwen Liu, Lianyong Qi, Xingyuan Mao, Weiming Liu, Shichao Pei, Fan Wang, Xuyun Zhang, Amin Beheshti, Xiaokang Zhou
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3144-3152.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/350
Recommender systems play a critical role in many applications by providing personalized recommendations based on user interactions. However, it remains a major challenge to capture complex sequential patterns and address noise in user interaction data. While advanced neural networks have enhanced sequential recommendation by modeling high-order item dependencies, they typically assume that the noisy interaction data as the user's preferred preferences. This assumption can lead to suboptimal recommendation results. We propose a Variational Graph Auto-Encoder driven Graph Enhancement (VGAE-GE) method for robust augmentation in sequential recommendation. Specifically, our method first constructs an item transition graph to capture higher-order interactions and employs a Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (VGAE) to generate latent variable distributions. By utilizing these latent variable distributions for graph reconstruction, we can improve the item representation. Next, we use a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to transform these latent variables into embeddings and infer more robust user representations from the updated item embeddings. Finally, we obtain the reconstructed user check-in data, and then use a Mamba-based recommender to make the recommendation process more efficient and the recommendation results more accurate. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that our VGAE-GE model improves recommendation performance and robustness.
Keywords:
Data Mining: DM: Recommender systems
Data Mining: DM: Mining spatial and/or temporal data
