Signed-Graph Recommendation as Structural Consistency Maximization

Temporal signed networks (TSNs) model the time evolution of cooperative and adversarial relationships that arise in applications such as social media analysis, trust and reputation systems, and financial transaction networks. While graph neural networks (GNNs) perform well for static or unsigned link prediction, effective learning in temporal signed graphs remains challenging due to the interaction of signed relations, evolving structure, and balance-theoretic constraints. To address this gap, we propose a \emph{modular} temporal enhancement framework for signed GNNs that integrates historical context into otherwise static architectures. The framework introduces a Historical Context Integration Module (HCIM) that combines learnable recency-aware temporal weighting, LSTM-based embedding trajectory modeling, and multi-head temporal attention to capture both short- and long-term signed interaction dynamics. Historical information is fused with current node representations using either global or node-adaptive weighting, allowing the architecture-agnostic framework to accommodate heterogeneous temporal behaviors. We instantiate the approach on the Self-Explainable Signed Graph Transformer (SE-SGformer), preserving interpretability while extending it with temporal awareness. Experiments on real-world and synthetic TSNs, including Bitcoin OTC, Bitcoin Alpha, Reddit, and small-world network models, demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over the static baseline.

Real-world recommendation platforms routinely collect explicit negative feedback such as 1-star reviews, hate-button clicks, distrust between users, and very-low watch-ratio videos. Learned sign-aware recommenders exploit this signal for clear accuracy gains, but only at the cost of gradient-based training. In parallel, a line of training-free spectral collaborative filtering methods matches or beats learned graph recommenders at a fraction of the cost, yet operates on positive interactions alone. We bridge these two lines with DualSpectralCF, a training-free framework of two components that attach to any spectral backbone of the form $\hat{\mathbf{r}}_u = F(\mathbf{M}) \mathbf{r}_u$: a signed input signal $\mathbf{r}_u^{\pm}$ that encodes the user's explicit dislikes, and a signed item-item operator $\mathbf{M}^{\pm}$ that blends like-together and dislike-together similarity. The framework is backbone-agnostic and adds just two scalar hyperparameters. We instantiate DualSpectralCF on ChebyCF, GF-CF, and Turbo-CF, and evaluate on five sign-aware benchmarks: every instance matches or beats its unsigned backbone on all 5 datasets, with Recall@20 lifts up to +32.6% with backbone-specific $(γ, κ)$ tuning and +1.9% to +16.0% for DualSpectralCF-Cheby at the fixed default $(γ= -0.5, κ= 0.1)$, and the family runs 7.7 to 155.3$\times$ faster than SIGformer while reaching 70.7% to 90.7% of its accuracy. Sign-awareness helps most for cold-start users, with up to +29.2% Recall@20 on Epinions users with 1 to 5 training items.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for recommendation (LLMRec) due to their powerful reasoning and generalization abilities. However, effectively aligning the textual semantics modeled by LLMs with the collaborative signals remains a key challenge. Existing methods either translate collaborative information into textual prompts or inject pre-trained embeddings into the LLM, both of which treat structural information as static input and fail to capture high-order relational dependencies. To bridge this gap, we propose GraphLoRA, a novel framework that generalizes low-rank adaptation from independent to structure-aware propagation. GraphLoRA embeds a trainable graph message-passing network within the low-rank adaptation pathway, enabling structural signals to propagate through the parameter space. This design allows collaborative topology to explicitly guide parameter updates, fostering deep integration between graph-structured and textual semantic information. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that GraphLoRA not only outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based recommendation methods but also achieves superior generalization, effectively balancing structural reasoning capability with computational efficiency. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/wgj15965/GraphLoRA}{https://github.com/wgj15965/GraphLoRA}.