GraphPro: Graph Pre-training and Prompt Learning for Recommendation

Yuhao Yang, Lianghao Xia, Da Luo, Kangyi Lin, Chao Huang

Abstract: GNN-based recommendation systems have been successful in capturing complex user-item interactions using multi-hop message passing. However, these methods often struggle to handle the dynamic nature of user-item interactions, making it challenging to adapt to changes in user preferences and new data distributions. This limits their scalability and performance in real-world dynamic scenarios. In our study, we propose a framework called GraphPro that combines dynamic graph pre-training with prompt learning in an efficient way. This unique approach allows GNNs to effectively capture both long-term user preferences and short-term behavior changes, resulting in accurate and up-to-date recommendations. To address the issue of changing user preferences, we integrate a temporal prompt mechanism and a graph-structural prompt learning mechanism into the pre-trained GNN architecture. The temporal prompt mechanism incorporates time-related information into user-item interactions, enabling the model to naturally incorporate temporal dynamics. The graph-structural prompt learning mechanism allows the model to apply pre-trained insights to new behavior dynamics without the need for continuous retraining. We also introduce a dynamic evaluation framework for recommendations that better reflects real-world scenarios and reduces the offline-online discrepancy. Through comprehensive experiments, including deployment in a large-scale industrial scenario, we demonstrate the seamless scalability of GraphPro with various leading recommenders. Our results highlight the superiority of GraphPro in terms of effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency. We release the model implementation at the link: https://github.com/HKUDS/GraphPro.