AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper
EdGCL: Disentangling Social and Cognitive Homophily in Graph-Based Educational Recommender Systems
- Qingqing Liang
- Chunyang Wang
- Peiwei Xia
- Yanan Zeng
- Xin Liu
- Xuesong Lu
- Aoying Zhou
Educational recommendation systems have been a fundamental component for alleviating learning disorientation in self-paced learning. While existing studies mainly leverage cognitive theories to guide learning motivation modeling, they critically overlook the role of social influences. Through empirical analysis, we identify social homophily as an additional driver of learning behaviors, i.e., learners tend to adopt resources validated by their social cohort. However, two challenges impede effective social homophily modeling: (1) the absence and sparsity of predefined social relations in online education, and (2) the deep entanglement of social homophily with cognitive homophily in behavioral data. To tackle these challenges, we propose a graph-based framework EdGCL that explicitly disentangles social homophily and cognitive homophily. EdGCL infers implicit social relations from learners' social behaviors and encodes them via a graph transformer, generating social-view representations. Simultaneously, it constructs a heterogeneous learning graph to model cognitive homophily, which is enhanced by a type-aware aggregator and cognitive diagnosis loss. To ensure the semantic distinctiveness of dual-view homophily modeling, a cross-view contrastive disentanglement mechanism is designed to pull intra-view representations closer while pushing inter-view representations away. Evaluation on two real-world educational datasets demonstrates the superior recommendation performance of EdGCL, highlighting the necessity of dual homophily modeling for understanding the motivations behind learning behaviors.