Recent studies have shown that graph neural networks for session-based recommendation systems typically recommend old items, making it difficult to recommend new items to users, leading to the phenomenon of the "information cocoon". To address this issue, this paper introduces a Multi-Factor Disentangled Graph Neural Network for Session-Based New Item Recommendation (MFD-GNN), which considers both the embedding of new items and user intent from a multi-factor perspective. First, item embeddings from sessions are generated across multiple factors using a disentangled network. By leveraging item classification and attribute information, new item embeddings are inferred through zero-shot learning. Attention weights are assigned to each factor to capture user intent across different factors, enabling reasonable recommendations for new items. Experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets, and the results are compared with those of leading recommendation models. The findings demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses current models in performance. These experimental outcomes confirm the approach's effectiveness and its advantages over existing methods.
Citation: Xinning Li, Qian Gao, Jun Fan, Lujie Feng. Multi-factor disentangled graph neural networks for session-based new item recommendation[J]. AIMS Mathematics, 2025, 10(10): 23067-23083. doi: 10.3934/math.20251024
Recent studies have shown that graph neural networks for session-based recommendation systems typically recommend old items, making it difficult to recommend new items to users, leading to the phenomenon of the "information cocoon". To address this issue, this paper introduces a Multi-Factor Disentangled Graph Neural Network for Session-Based New Item Recommendation (MFD-GNN), which considers both the embedding of new items and user intent from a multi-factor perspective. First, item embeddings from sessions are generated across multiple factors using a disentangled network. By leveraging item classification and attribute information, new item embeddings are inferred through zero-shot learning. Attention weights are assigned to each factor to capture user intent across different factors, enabling reasonable recommendations for new items. Experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets, and the results are compared with those of leading recommendation models. The findings demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses current models in performance. These experimental outcomes confirm the approach's effectiveness and its advantages over existing methods.
| [1] |
R. Patel, P. Thakkar, V. Ukani, CNNRec: Convolutional neural network based recommender systems– A survey, Eng. Appl. Artif. Intel., 133 (2024), 108062. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2024.108062 doi: 10.1016/j.engappai.2024.108062
|
| [2] |
X. Li, L. Sun, M. Ling, Y. Peng, A survey of graph neural network based recommendation in social networks, Neurocomputing, 549 (2023), 126441. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2023.126441 doi: 10.1016/j.neucom.2023.126441
|
| [3] | S. Wang, Q. Zhang, L. Hu, X. Zhang, Y. Wang, C. Aggarwal, Sequential/session-based recommendations: Challenges, approaches, applications and opportunities, In: SIGIR '22: Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2022, 3425–3428. https://doi.org/10.1145/3477495.3532685 |
| [4] | Z. Wang, W. Wei, G. Cong, X. L. Li, X. L. Mao, M. Qiu, Global context enhanced graph neural networks for session-based recommendation, In: SIGIR '20: Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2020,169–178. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397271.3401142 |
| [5] | S. Wang, L. Cao, Y. Wang, Q. Z. Sheng, M. Orgun, D. Lian, A survey on session-based recommender systems, 2019, arXiv: 1902.04864. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1902.04864 |
| [6] | S. Rendle, C. Freudenthaler, L. Schmidt-Thieme, Factorizing personalized Markov chains for next-basket recommendation, In: WWW '10: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web, 2010,811–820. https://doi.org/10.1145/1772690.1772773 |
| [7] | G. Bonnin, D. Jannach, Automated generation of music playlists: Survey and experiments, ACM Comput. Surv., 47 (2014), 1–35 https://doi.org/10.1145/2652481 |
| [8] |
P. Tong, Z. Zhang, Q. Liu, Y. Wang, R. Wang, CARE: Context-aware attention interest redistribution for session-based recommendation, Expert Syst. Appl., 255 (2024), 124714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2024.124714 doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2024.124714
|
| [9] | B. Hidasi, A. Karatzoglou, L. Baltrunas, D. Tikk, Session-based recommendations with recurrent neural networks, 2016, arXiv: 1511.06939v4. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1511.06939 |
| [10] |
B. Peng, S. Parthasarathy, X. Ning, Intention enhanced mixed attentive model for session-based recommendation, Data Min. Knowl. Disc., 38 (2024), 2032–2061. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-024-01023-0 doi: 10.1007/s10618-024-01023-0
|
| [11] |
T. R. Gwadabe, Y. Liu, Improving graph neural network for session-based recommendation system via non-sequential interactions, Neurocomputing, 468 (2022), 111–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2021.10.034 doi: 10.1016/j.neucom.2021.10.034
|
| [12] |
S. Wu, Y. Tang, Y. Zhu, L. Wang, X. Xie, T. Tan, Session-based recommendation with graph neural networks, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 33 (2019), 346–353. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v33i01.3301346 doi: 10.1609/aaai.v33i01.3301346
|
| [13] | C. Xu, P. Zhao, Y. Liu, V. S. Sheng, J. Xu, F. Zhuang, et al., Graph contextualized self-attention network for session-based recommendation, In: IJCAI'19: Proceedings of the 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019, 3940–3946. |
| [14] | J. Li, P. Ren, Z. Chen, Z. Ren, T. Lian, J. Ma, Neural attentive session-based recommendation, In: CIKM '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2017, 1419–1428 https://doi.org/10.1145/3132847.3132926 |
| [15] |
L. Yin, P. Chen, G. Zheng, Session-enhanced graph neural network recommendation model (SE-GNNRM), Appl. Sci., 12 (2022), 4314 https://doi.org/10.3390/app12094314 doi: 10.3390/app12094314
|
| [16] | D. Jin, L. Wang, Y. Zheng, G. Song, F. Jiang, X. Li, et al., Dual intent enhanced graph neural network for session-based new item recommendation, In: WWW '23: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023, 2023,684–693. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543507.3583526 |
| [17] |
L. Chen, G. Zhu, W. Liang, J. Cao, Y. Chen, Keywords-enhanced contrastive learning model for travel recommendation, Informa. Process. Manag., 61 (2024), 103874. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2024.103874 doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2024.103874
|
| [18] |
L. Chen, X. Zhu, G. Zhu, Exploiting attributes and keywords for session-based recommendation with multi-view graph neural network, Expert Syst. Appl., 296 (2026), 128990. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2025.128990 doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2025.128990
|
| [19] | Y. Bengio, A. Courville, P. Vincent, Representation learning: A review and new perspectives, 2014, arXiv: 1206.5538v3. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1206.5538 |
| [20] |
Y. Yuan, F. Xu, H. Cao, G. Zhang, P. Hui, Y. Li, et al., Persuade to click: Context-aware persuasion model for online textual advertisement, IEEE T. Knowl. Data En., 35 (2023), 1938–1951. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2021.3110724 doi: 10.1109/TKDE.2021.3110724
|
| [21] | Y. Li, D. Tarlow, M. Brockschmidt, R. Zemel, Gated graph sequence neural networks, 2016, arXiv: 1511.05493. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1511.05493 |
| [22] | X. Wang, H. Jin, A. Zhang, X. He, T. Xu, T. S. Chua, Disentangled graph collaborative filtering, In: SIGIR '20: Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2020, 1001–1010. https://doi.org/10.1145/3397271.3401137 |
| [23] | S. Zhang, Y. Lin, Y. Rao, C. Zhang, Dual-perspective disentangled multi-intent alignment for enhanced collaborative filtering, 2025, arXiv: 2506.11538v2. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.11538 |
| [24] | S. Chen, W. Wang, B. Xia, Q. Peng, X. You, F. Zheng, et al., Free: Feature refinement for generalized zero-shot learning, In: 2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021,122–131. |
| [25] |
H. Xu, A. Woicik, H. Poon, R. B. Altman, S. Wang, Multilingual translation for zero-shot biomedical classification using BioTranslator, Nat. Commun., 14 (2023), 738. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36476-2 doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-36476-2
|
| [26] |
X. Zhang, B. Xu, C. Li, B. He, H. Lin, C. Ma, et al., A survey on side information-driven session-based recommendation: from a data-centric perspective, IEEE T. Knowl. Data En., 37 (2025), 4411–4431. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2025.3569549 doi: 10.1109/TKDE.2025.3569549
|
| [27] | A. Li, Z. Cheng, F. Liu, Z. Gao, W. Guan, Y. Peng, Disentangled graph neural networks for session-based recommendation, IEEE T. Knowl. Data En., 35 (2023), 7870–7882. https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2022.3208782 |
| [28] | X. Xia, H. Yin, J. Yu, Y. Shao, L. Cui, Self-supervised graph co-training for session-based recommendation, In: CIKM '21: Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management, 2021, 2180–2190. https://doi.org/10.1145/3459637.3482388 |
| [29] | Z. Ou, X. Zhang, Y. Zhu, S. Lyu, J. Liu, T. Ao, LS-TGNN: Long and short-term temporal graph neural network for session-based recommendation, In: Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 39 (2025), 12426–12434. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i12.33354 |
| [30] |
L. Wang, D. Jin, A time-sensitive graph neural network for session-based new item recommendation, Electronics, 13 (2024), 223. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13010223 doi: 10.3390/electronics13010223
|
| [31] |
L. Chen, G. Zhu, Self-supervised contrastive learning for itinerary recommendation, Expert Syst. Appl., 268 (2025), 126246. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2024.126246 doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2024.126246
|