ContextGNN: Beyond Two-Tower Recommendation Systems

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission11092 Authors

27 Sept 2024 (modified: 28 Nov 2024)ICLR 2025 Conference SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: graph neural networks, recommendation, relational deep learning
Abstract: Recommendation systems predominantly utilize two-tower architectures, which evaluate user-item rankings through the inner product of their respective embeddings. However, one key limitation of two-tower models is that they learn a pair-agnostic representation of users and items. In contrast, pair-wise representations either scale poorly due to their quadratic complexity or are too restrictive on the candidate pairs to rank. To address these issues, we introduce Context-based Graph Neural Networks (ContextGNNs), a novel deep learning architecture for link prediction in recommendation systems. The method employs a pair-wise representation technique for familiar items situated within a user's local subgraph, while leveraging two-tower representations to facilitate the recommendation of exploratory items. A final network then predicts how to fuse both pair-wise and two-tower recommendations into a single ranking of items. We demonstrate that ContextGNN is able to adapt to different data characteristics and outperforms existing methods, both traditional and GNN-based, on a diverse set of practical recommendation tasks, improving performance by 20\% on average.
Primary Area: learning on graphs and other geometries & topologies
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Submission Number: 11092
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