Decision-Aware Preference Modeling for Multi-Behavior Recommendation

Abstract

In recommender systems, multi-behavior methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in addressing issues such as data sparsity—challenges commonly encountered by traditional single-behavior recommendation methods. These methods typically infer user preferences from various auxiliary behaviors and apply them to recommendations for the target behavior. However, existing methods face challenges in uncovering the interaction patterns for different behaviors from multi-behavior implicit feedback, as users exhibit varying preference strengths for different items across behaviors. To address this issue, this paper introduces a novel approach, Decision-Aware Preference Modeling (DAPM), for multi-behavior recommendation. We first construct a behavior-agnostic graph to learn comprehensive representations that are not affected by behavior factors, complementing the behavior-specific representations. Subsequently, we introduce an innovative contrastive learning paradigm that emphasizes inter-behavior consistency and intra-behavior uniformity to alleviate the “false repulsion” problem in traditional contrastive learning. Furthermore, we propose a multi-behavior hinge loss with boundary constraints to explicitly model users' decision boundaries across different behaviors, thereby enhancing the model’s ability to accurately capture users' inconsistent preference intensities. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the consistent improvements achieved by DAPM over thirteen state-of-the-art baselines. We release our code at https://github.com/Breeze-del/DAPM.