Disentangled Contrastive Learning for Social Recommendation

Jiahao Wu, Wenqi Fan, Jingfan Chen, Shengcai Liu, Qing Li, Ke Tang

Abstract: Social recommendations utilize social relations to enhance the representation learning for recommendations. Most social recommendation models unify user representations for the user-item interactions (collaborative domain) and social relations (social domain). However, such an approach may fail to model the users' heterogeneous behavior patterns in two domains, impairing the expressiveness of user representations. In this work, to address such limitation, we propose a novel Disentangled contrastive learning framework for social Recommendations (DcRec). More specifically, we propose to learn disentangled users' representations from the item and social domains. Moreover, disentangled contrastive learning is designed to perform knowledge transfer between disentangled users' representations for social recommendations. Comprehensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model.