Enhancing Attributed Graph Networks with Alignment and Uniformity Constraints for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based Recommendation (SBR), seeking to predict a user’s next action based on an anonymous session, has drawn increasing attention for its practicability. Most SBR models only rely on the contextual transitions within a short session to learn item representations while neglecting additional valuable knowledge. As such, their model capacity is largely limited by the data sparsity issue caused by short sessions. A few studies have exploited the Modeling of Item Attributes (MIA) to enrich item representations. However, they usually involve specific model designs that can hardly transfer to existing attribute-agnostic SBR models and thus lack universality. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic framework, named AttrGAU (Attributed Graph Networks with Alignment and Uniformity Constraints), to bring the MIA’s superiority into existing attribute-agnostic models, to improve their accuracy and robustness for recommendation. Specifically, we first build a bipartite attributed graph and design an attribute-aware graph convolution to exploit the rich attribute semantics hidden in the heterogeneous item-attribute relationship. We then decouple existing attribute-agnostic SBR models into the graph neural network and attention readout sub-modules to satisfy the non-intrusive requirement. Lastly, we design two representation constraints, i.e., alignment and uniformity, to optimize distribution discrepancy in representation between the attribute semantics and collaborative semantics. Extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed AttrGAU framework can significantly enhance backbone models’ recommendation performance and robustness against data sparsity and data noise issues. Our implementation codes will be available at https://github.com/ItsukiFujii/AttrGAU.