NGAT4Rec: Neighbor-Aware Graph Attention Network For Recommendation

Learning informative representations (aka. embeddings) of users and items is the core of modern recommender systems. Previous works exploit user-item relationships of one-hop neighbors in the user-item interaction graph to improve the quality of representation. Recently, the research of Graph Neural Network (GNN) for recommendation considers the implicit collaborative information of multi-hop neighbors to enrich the representation. However, most works of GNN for recommendation systems do not consider the relational information which implies the expression differences of different neighbors in the neighborhood explicitly. The influence of each neighboring item to the representation of the user's preference can be represented by the correlation between the item and neighboring items of the user. Symmetrically, for a given item, the correlation between one neighboring user and neighboring users can reflect the strength of signal about the item's characteristic. To modeling the implicit correlations of neighbors in graph embedding aggregating, we propose a Neighbor-Aware Graph Attention Network for recommendation task, termed NGAT4Rec. It employs a novel neighbor-aware graph attention layer that assigns different neighbor-aware attention coefficients to different neighbors of a given node by computing the attention among these neighbors pairwisely. Then NGAT4Rec aggregates the embeddings of neighbors according to the corresponding neighbor-aware attention coefficients to generate next layer embedding for every node. Furthermore, we combine more neighbor-aware graph attention layer to gather the influential signals from multi-hop neighbors. We remove feature transformation and nonlinear activation that proved to be useless on collaborative filtering. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms various state-of-the-art models consistently.