DRSoRec: Dual-Rectification of Social Networks for Recommendation

Abstract

Leveraging social homophily to enhance user preference modeling, social recommendation has become a cornerstone of modern recommender systems. However, the raw social network contains inherent unreliability as it teems with noise---misclicks, bot-generated and transient ties---while many meaningful links remain unobserved. In this study, we propose DRSoRec, a dual-rectification model to rectify the raw social networks by simultaneously removing noisy signals and preserving useful information. Specifically, the invariant social rationale discovery module distills each user's influential core social circle of the current recommendation, whereas the adaptive social connection refinement module employs a mixture-of-experts structure learner to prune spurious edges and uncover latent links. A contrastive optimization objective is designed to align and mutually enhance these two modules, and the refined user representations are fused with collaborative representations generated from interactions for the final recommendation. Experiments on three public datasets confirm that DRSoRec consistently gains over state-of-the-art baselines.