DHMRec: Collaboration-Guided Multimodal Disentanglement and Hierarchical Fusion for Recommendation

Abstract Multimodal recommender systems have emerged as a pivotal paradigm for harnessing diverse data modalities to deliver personalized services. Contemporary research predominantly focuses on integrating heterogeneous modality information through graph learning. However, these approaches face two key challenges: (1) the inherent complexity of modalities, characterized by entangled redundant signals and noise; and (2) the challenge of effectively integrating multimodal representations, each of which may exert varying degrees of influence on users' preferences. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Collaboration-Guided Multimodal Disentanglement and Hierarchical Fusion for Recommendation (DHMRec), which simultaneously achieves intra-modal denoising disentanglement and inter-modal hierarchical fusion. Specifically, we introduce a collaboration-related modality disentanglement module to distinguish between modality-common and modality-specific features. Then, through multi-view graph learning to capture both item-item dependencies and user-item interaction patterns. Additionally, we implement hierarchical fusion between the disentangled multimodal features and ID embeddings using a positive-negative attention-aware fusion module and an interaction distribution-based alignment module. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that our DHMRec surpasses various state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in intra-modal disentanglement and multimodal features fusion.