通过因果推理优化图聚合权重,减少推荐系统中的热门偏差。
Causality-aware Graph Aggregation Weight Estimator for Popularity Debiasing in Top-K Recommendation
- 将图聚合视为因果推断中的后门调整,建模真实交互概率分布。
- 在三个数据集上显著优于现有方法,提升冷门物品推荐效果。
- 适合关注推荐系统公平性与去偏技术的研究者和工程师。
基于图的推荐系统依赖邻居聚合生成节点表示,但对热门物品偏差高度敏感,导致信息传播中的回音效应。现有去偏方法虽尝试通过边重构或权重调整改进聚合过程,但仍无法充分缓解偏差问题,原因在于:1)缺乏对聚合合理性的理论支撑,无最优性保障;2)训练与去偏过程失衡,削弱有效性。本文提出一种新方法,通过理性建模图聚合过程来减轻热门偏差。我们发现图聚合本质上是因果推断中的后门调整,聚合权重对应历史交互概率分布。基于此,设计了编码器-解码器结构的因果感知聚合权重估计器(CAGED),通过优化交互概率的证据下界来逼近无偏聚合权重。为增强早期训练阶段的去偏效果,进一步引入动量更新策略,逐步优化聚合权重矩阵。在三个数据集上的大量实验表明,CAGED显著优于现有基于图的去偏方法。代码已开源:https://github.com/QueYork/CAGED。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Graph-based recommender systems leverage neighborhood aggregation to generate node representations, which is highly sensitive to popularity bias, resulting in an echo effect during information propagation. Existing graph-based debiasing solutions refine the aggregation process with attempts such as edge reconstruction or weight adjustment. However, these methods remain inadequate in fully alleviating popularity bias. Specifically, this is because 1) they provide no insights into graph aggregation rationality, thus lacking an optimality guarantee; 2) they fail to well balance the training and debiasing process, which undermines the effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to mitigate popularity bias through rational modeling of the graph aggregation process. We reveal that graph aggregation is a special form of backdoor adjustment in causal inference, where the aggregation weight corresponds to the historical interaction likelihood distribution. Based on this insight, we devise an encoder-decoder architecture, namely Causality-aware Graph Aggregation Weight Estimator for Debiasing (CAGED), to approximate the unbiased aggregation weight by optimizing the evidence lower bound of the interaction likelihood. In order to enhance the debiasing effectiveness during early training stages, we further design a momentum update strategy that incrementally refines the aggregation weight matrix. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that CAGED outperforms existing graph-based debiasing methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/QueYork/CAGED.
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