BLoG: Bootstrapped graph representation learning with local and global regularization for recommendation

With the explosive growth of online information, the significant application value of recommender systems has received considerable attention. Since user–item interactions can naturally fit into graph structure data, graph neural networks (GNNs), by virtue of their strong ability in graph representation learning, have become the new state-of-the-art approach to recommender systems. Recently, GNN-based contrastive self-supervised learning (SSL) methods have received careful attention due to their superiority over graph-based recommendation under the typical supervised learning paradigm. However, to achieve state-of-the-art performance, GNN-based recommendation with SSL often needs a huge amount of negative examples and the model’s performance is heavily dependent on complex data augmentations. Also, the information interaction among various augmented views is often performed under a single perspective (e.g., structure/feature space or node/graph level). In this paper, we propose a novel bootstrapped graph representation learning with local and global regularization for recommendation, i.e., BLoG, which constructs positive/negative pairs based on the aggregated node features by referring to two alternate views of the original user–item graph structure. In particular, BLoG learns user–item representations by encoding two augmented versions of a user–item bipartite graph using two separate encoders: an online encoder and a target encoder. To facilitate the information interaction between these two distinct graph encoders, we introduce local and global regularization for recommendation, where a graph structural contrastive loss and a node-level semantic loss are defined for local regularization while a graph-level contrastive loss is used for global regularization. An alternative optimization approach is used to train the online encoder and the target encoder. Experimental studies on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that BLoG achieves better recommendation accuracy than several existing baselines.