Unifying Graph Convolution and Contrastive Learning in Collaborative Filtering
<|reference_start|>Unifying Graph Convolution and Contrastive Learning in Collaborative Filtering: 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}<|reference_end|>
@article{wu2024unifying,
    title={Unifying Graph Convolution and Contrastive Learning in Collaborative
  Filtering},
    author={Yihong Wu, Le Zhang, Fengran Mo, Tianyu Zhu, Weizhi Ma, Jian-Yun Nie},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.13996},
    year={2024},
    doi={10.1145/3637528.3671840},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2406.13996},
    primaryClass={cs.IR}
}