Flow Matching for Denoised Social Recommendation

Yinxuan Huang, KE LIANG, Zhuofan Dong, Xiaodong Qu, Wang Tianxiang, Yue Han, Jingao Xu, Bin Zhou, Ye Wang

Abstract: Graph-based social recommendation (SR) models suffer from various noises of the social graphs, hindering their recommendation performances. Either graph-level redundancy or graph-level missing will indeed influence the social graph structures, further influencing the message propagation procedure of graph neural networks (GNNs). Generative models, especially diffusion-based models, are usually used to reconstruct and recover the data in better quality from original data with noises. Motivated by it, a few works take attempts on it for social recommendation. However, they can only handle isotropic Gaussian noises but fail to leverage the anisotropic ones. Meanwhile the anisotropic relational structures in social graphs are commonly seen, so that existing models cannot sufficiently utilize the graph structures, which constraints the capacity of noise removal and recommendation performances. Compared to the diffusion strategy, the flow matching strategy shows better ability to handle the data with anisotropic noises since they can better preserve the data structures during the learning procedure. Inspired by it, we propose RecFlow which is the first flow-matching based SR model. Concretely, RecFlow performs flow matching on the structure representations of social graphs. Then, a conditional learning procedure is designed for optimization. Extensive performances prove the promising performances of our RecFlow from six aspects, including superiority, effectiveness, robustnesses, sensitivity, convergence and visualization.

Lay Summary: This paper introduces RecFlow, a flow-based social recommendation model that captures anisotropic and directed noise in user interactions. By leveraging flow matching, RecFlow enhances representation learning and denoising efficiency. This work advances understanding of continuous-time generative models in graph-structured data and emphasizes the practical benefits for personalized recommendation. We also acknowledge potential societal risks, such as bias amplification, and highlight the need for fairness and robustness in future flow-based recommendation systems.

Application-Driven Machine Learning: This submission is on Application-Driven Machine Learning.

Primary Area: Applications->Social Sciences

Keywords: Graph Machine Learning; Social Recommendation; Flow matching

Flagged For Ethics Review: true

Submission Number: 9410