针对推荐图中关系基数差异,提出分解损失函数提升属性嵌入质量。
Cardinality-Decomposed Loss: Matching Training Objectives to Relation Structure in Heterogeneous Recommendation Graphs

- 按关系基数分解损失,协同优化交叉熵与BPR
- 显著提升属性嵌入区分度,避免嵌入坍缩
- 适用于需精准属性建模的个性化推荐场景
在异构二分图上训练的图神经网络是推荐系统的基础。这类图中关系的基数差异显著:用户-物品偏好为一对多,用户-属性特征则为一对一。传统方法对所有网络组件使用单一损失函数(如BPR),虽在推荐任务上表现良好,却导致属性嵌入坍缩至近随机几何——这一隐蔽问题不影响标准排名指标,难以被常规评估发现。这进一步污染了同时受两类边影响的用户节点嵌入,损害个性化、分群等下游任务。本文提出基数分解损失(CDL),融合交叉熵(CE)与BPR,使模型能联合优化不同基数的关系。通过实证发现,两种损失在共享编码器参数空间中存在冲突。在五个数据集(包含用户端和物品端的一对一属性)上验证,CDL一致提升了属性嵌入的可区分性。当属性携带有意义的偏好信号时,排序性能(NDCG)提升;反之则下降。引入λ参数调节权衡,λ扫描揭示数据集行为由两个图属性决定:语义对齐(属性是否预测偏好)与拓扑泄露(图连接性是否已编码该信息)。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Graph Neural Networks trained on heterogenous bipartite graphs form a common basis in recommendation systems. These graphs often express relations that vary in cardinality, for example, user-item preferences are one-to-many and user-attribute features are one-to-one. Traditionally, a unique loss function is applied for all of the network components which is often Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR). While BPR works well for the recommendation task, we find that it causes attribute embeddings to collapse to near-random geometry -- a silent failure that leaves standard ranking metrics largely unaffected and therefore invisible to conventional evaluation. This in turn pollutes user node embeddings, which are shaped by both edge types simultaneously, hurting downstream tasks like personalization, segmentation, etc. Here we propose a Cardinality-Decomposed Loss (CDL) that combines both Cross Entropy (CE) and BPR to enable the model to collectively optimize for relations across cardinalities. We confirm this CE-BPR conflict by showing the two losses compete in the shared encoder's parameter space. We evaluate CDL on five datasets spanning two structural configurations -- one-to-one attributes on user nodes (MovieLens-1M, Last.fm-360K, PayPal Audience Factory, BookCrossing) and on item nodes (Yelp) -- and find that CDL consistently improves discriminability in attribute embeddings. We also show that ranking (NDCG) improves when attributes carry meaningful preference signal, but conflicts with it when the correlation is weak. We use a lambda parameter to navigate this trade-off, and a lambda-sweep reveals that dataset behavior is governed by two graph properties -- semantic alignment and topology leakage. Semantic alignment measures whether the attribute predicts preferences, while topology leakage measures whether the graph's connectivity already encodes it.
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