DivGCL: A Graph Contrastive Learning Model for Diverse Recommendation

Abstract Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL), as a primary paradigm of graph self-supervised learning, spurs a fruitful line of research in tackling the data sparsity issue by maximizing the consistency of user/item embeddings between different augmented views with random perturbations. However, diversity, as a crucial metric for recommendation performance and user satisfaction, has received rather little attention. In fact, there exists a challenging dilemma in balancing accuracy and diversity. To address these issues, we propose a new Graph Contrastive Learning (DivGCL) model for diversifying recommendations. Inspired by the excellence of the determinant point process (DPP), DivGCL adopts a DPP likelihood-based loss function to achieve an ideal trade-off between diversity and accuracy, optimizing it jointly with the advanced Gaussian noise-augmented GCL objective. Extensive experiments on four popular datasets demonstrate that DivGCL surpasses existing approaches in balancing accuracy and diversity, with an improvement of 23.47% at T@20 (abbreviation for trade-off metric) on ML-1M.