Multi-Graph Co-Training for Capturing User Intent in Session-based Recommendation

Zhe Yang, Tiantian Liang


Abstract
Session-based recommendation focuses on predicting the next item a user will interact with based on sequences of anonymous user sessions. A significant challenge in this field is data sparsity due to the typically short-term interactions. Most existing methods rely heavily on users’ current interactions, overlooking the wealth of auxiliary information available. To address this, we propose a novel model, the Multi-Graph Co-Training model (MGCOT), which leverages not only the current session graph but also similar session graphs and a global item relation graph. This approach allows for a more comprehensive exploration of intrinsic relationships and better captures user intent from multiple views, enabling session representations to complement each other. Additionally, MGCOT employs multi-head attention mechanisms to effectively capture relevant session intent and uses contrastive learning to form accurate and robust session representations. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that MGCOT significantly enhances the performance of session-based recommendations, particularly on the Diginetica dataset, achieving improvements up to 2.00% in P@20 and 10.70% in MRR@20. Resources have been made publicly available in our GitHub repository https://github.com/liang-tian-tian/MGCOT.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.92
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1377–1386
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.92/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhe Yang and Tiantian Liang. 2025. Multi-Graph Co-Training for Capturing User Intent in Session-based Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1377–1386, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Graph Co-Training for Capturing User Intent in Session-based Recommendation (Yang & Liang, COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.92.pdf