Revisiting Contrastive Learning in Collaborative Filtering via Parallel Graph Filters

Abstract Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for modeling user–item interactions and learning high-quality representations in recommender systems. While existing GCL-based methods benefit from data augmentation and sampling strategies, they often overlook the inherent limitations of the contrastive objectives: 1) Stacking multiple Graph Convolutional Network layers to capture high-order information often causes the over-smoothing phenomenon, where node representations become overly similar. 2) Structurally similar negative sample pairs may exhibit high cosine similarity, causing gradient saturation during representation optimization. To address the above challenges, we revisit matrix factorization in recommendation models and uncover its implicit connection to a parallel graph filter bank. This perspective reveals how overly aggressive low-pass or high-pass filtering distorts feature distributions, contributing to gradient saturation. Building on this insight, we propose Light Cosine Similarity Collaborative Filtering (LightCSCF), a margin-constrained method that improves gradient optimization in contrastive learning by focusing on structurally hard examples, alleviating both gradient saturation and boundary over-smoothing. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that LightCSCF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recommendation accuracy and robustness to data sparsity.