Signed-Graph Recommendation as Structural Consistency Maximization
For researchers in signed social recommendation, the paper addresses the problem of biased representations due to structural noise and data sparsity, but the improvements are incremental over existing methods.
The paper identifies structural inconsistency in existing signed social recommendation models and proposes SSC-Loop, a framework that maximizes structural consistency across structural, propagation, and semantic layers. Experiments on Epinions show strong performance on signed rating prediction, with auxiliary results on Slashdot demonstrating its ability to exploit signed social structures.
While signed social recommendation has shown great potential by modeling both trust and distrust relations, its effectiveness is often hindered by structural noise and data sparsity. In this work, we first identify a fundamental inconsistency across the structural, propagation, and semantic layers of existing models, which leads to biased representations learned from sparse or noisy datasets. Furthermore, we observe that most existing methods treat the observed graph as fixed, failing to bridge the gap between noisy topologies and reliable social semantics. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework named SSC-Loop that treats signed social recommendation as the maximization of structural consistency. SSC-Loop includes three dedicated modules: ESA-DA for structural consistency, a P/N/O propagation mechanism for propagation consistency, and a contrastive learning objective for semantic consistency. Experiments on Epinions demonstrate that SSC-Loop achieves strong performance on explicit signed social rating prediction, while auxiliary results on Slashdot under a derived link-existence setting further suggest its ability to exploit signed social structures. Source code is available at https://github.com/Refrainwww/SSC-Loop.