CADRL: Category-Aware Dual-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Explainable Recommendations over Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have been widely adopted to mitigate data sparsity and address cold-start issues in recommender systems. While existing KGs-based recommendation methods can predict user preferences and demands, they fall short in generating explicit recommendation paths and lack explainability. As a step beyond the above methods, recent advancements utilize reinforcement learning (RL) to find suitable items for a given user via explainable recommendation paths. However, the performance of these solutions is still limited by the following two points. (1) Lack of ability to capture contextual dependencies from neighboring information. (2) The excessive reliance on short recommendation paths due to efficiency concerns. To surmount these challenges, we propose a category-aware dual-agent reinforcement learning (CADRL) model for explainable recommendations over KGs. Specifically, our model comprises two components: (1) a category-aware gated graph neural network that jointly captures context-aware item representations from neighboring entities and categories, and (2) a dual-agent RL framework where two agents efficiently traverse long paths to search for suitable items. Finally, experimental results show that CADRL outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency on large-scale datasets.