DisCo: Graph-Based Disentangled Contrastive Learning for Cold-Start Cross-Domain Recommendation

Hourun Li, Yifan Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Jia Yang, Changling Zhou, Ming Zhang, Wei Ju

Abstract: Recommender systems are widely used in various real-world applications, but they often encounter the persistent challenge of the user cold-start problem. Cross-domain recommendation (CDR), which leverages user interactions from one domain to improve prediction performance in another, has emerged as a promising solution. However, users with similar preferences in the source domain may exhibit different interests in the target domain. Therefore, directly transferring embeddings may introduce irrelevant source-domain collaborative information. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based disentangled contrastive learning framework to capture fine-grained user intent and filter out irrelevant collaborative information, thereby avoiding negative transfer. Specifically, for each domain, we use a multi-channel graph encoder to capture diverse user intents. We then construct the affinity graph in the embedding space and perform multi-step random walks to capture high-order user similarity relationships. Treating one domain as the target, we propose a disentangled intent-wise contrastive learning approach, guided by user similarity, to refine the bridging of user intents across domains.Extensive experiments on four benchmark CDR datasets demonstrate that DisCo consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, thereby validating the effectiveness of both DisCo and its components.