CAFU: Constrained Alignment and Filtered Uniformity for Denoising Recommendation

Abstract In recommender systems, recent advances highlight the critical role of alignment and uniformity (AU) in representation learning. Specifically, AU-based methods pull positive user-item pairs closer (alignment) and spread the overall representation distribution (uniformity), typically relying on observed positive samples. Despite their effectiveness, exist methods face two limitations: (1) noise issues have a more severe impact on AU-based methods in the absence of negative samples, leading to the capture of spurious signals such as misclicks or non-preferential behaviors; (2) data sparsity weakens the alignment of user-item representations, hindering reliable representation learning and harming recommendations for sparse users. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel recommendation framework named Constrained Alignment and Filtered Uniformity (CAFU). CAFU enhances robustness through Filtered Uniformity (FU) and improves performance under data sparsity via Constrained Alignment (CA). Specifically, FU adopts a threshold-based strategy to eliminate unreliable samples that degrade embedding quality, thereby strengthening robustness. In parallel, CA mitigates the impact of sparsity by masking low-confidence user-item pairs based on angular distance, leading to better recommendation for sparse users. Extensive experiments on three datasets and three backbones demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed framework.