RaDAR: Relation-aware Diffusion-Asymmetric Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Discrete Diffusion Models (DDMs) have recently been introduced to recommendation systems, modeling user history as a token generation process via iterative denoising. However, while effective at capturing user-level sequential patterns, these methods often fail to explicitly integrate item-based collaborative filtering information, a critical component for accurate recommendation. This deficiency manifests in two key aspects: (1) the item representation is often semantic-focused, lacking collaborative priors for diffusion training; and (2) the denoising process employs a uniform noise schedule, treating all tokens indiscriminately and ignoring item-level adaptive structural dependencies. To bridge this gap, we propose ANR-DiffRec, a unified framework designed to encode item-based collaborative structures into discrete diffusion for generative recommendation. First, we explicitly incorporate an item co-occurrence matrix to guide semantic ID generation, providing a structured collaborative prior for discrete diffusion training. Second, we introduce an item-based adaptive noise rescheduling mechanism that dynamically adjusts denoising weights according to both local contextual recoverability and behavior-aware item dependencies. Specifically, the proposed strategy jointly models intra-item structural context and inter-item collaborative signals, enabling structure-aware denoising during diffusion training. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative recommendation models. Code: https://github.com/CalmaQi/ANR-DiffRec.

Graph Collaborative Filtering models have achieved remarkable success in recommendation systems. However, they inherently suffer from a catastrophic representation collapse in strict cold-start scenarios due to the topological isolation of unobserved items. While integrating multi-modal semantic features offers a potential remedy, directly mapping isolated semantic attributes into a globally topology-driven collaborative space frequently precipitates representation degradation and optimization conflicts. To bridge this fundamental structural divide, we propose DualGCN, an innovative Dual-Branch Graph Knowledge Distillation Framework. Operating under a decoupled two-stage training paradigm, DualGCN first constructs a robust collaborative teacher network where item representations are anchored by a topology-smoothed semantic prior, effectively reshaping the latent manifold. Subsequently, a semantic student branch employs a residual mapping mechanism and a magnitude-agnostic cosine distillation objective to achieve high-fidelity cross-modal alignment without disrupting established collaborative signals. Furthermore, we introduce a dynamic norm reconstruction mechanism to rigorously calibrate the physical scales of novel and warm items during global retrieval. Extensive experiments across three real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that DualGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in strict cold-start scenarios while comprehensively preserving recommendation accuracy for highly active items.

In recent years, the use of edge information provided by knowledge graphs together with the advantages of higher-order connectivity in graph neural networks for recommendation systems has become an important research direction. However, existing approaches are often limited by sparse labels, insufficient graph structure learning, and noisy entities in the knowledge graph, which reduce recommendation accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose a multi-view graph contrastive learning framework. The proposed method enhances user representations through multi-view knowledge graph distillation, enabling more accurate modeling of user preferences over entities and relations. The network aggregates neighborhood entity information to construct informative item representations. Furthermore, we design a multi-level self-supervised contrastive learning module that performs comparisons across three perspectives: Inter-Level, Intra-Level, and Interaction-Level. This design improves the model's ability to generalize across intra-class samples while increasing discrimination between inter-class samples, thereby enabling more effective multi-dimensional feature modeling. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets using both baseline and ablation settings. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of each module in the proposed model.