Paper ID: 2308.07222

MM-GEF: Multi-modal representation meet collaborative filtering

Hao Wu, Alejandro Ariza-Casabona, Bartłomiej Twardowski, Tri Kurniawan Wijaya

In modern e-commerce, item content features in various modalities offer accurate yet comprehensive information to recommender systems. The majority of previous work either focuses on learning effective item representation during modelling user-item interactions, or exploring item-item relationships by analysing multi-modal features. Those methods, however, fail to incorporate the collaborative item-user-item relationships into the multi-modal feature-based item structure. In this work, we propose a graph-based item structure enhancement method MM-GEF: Multi-Modal recommendation with Graph Early-Fusion, which effectively combines the latent item structure underlying multi-modal contents with the collaborative signals. Instead of processing the content feature in different modalities separately, we show that the early-fusion of multi-modal features provides significant improvement. MM-GEF learns refined item representations by injecting structural information obtained from both multi-modal and collaborative signals. Through extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets, we demonstrate systematical improvements of our method over state-of-the-art multi-modal recommendation methods.

Submitted: Aug 14, 2023