Author name cluster

Yahong Lian

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

2 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Sign-Aware Multimodal Graph Recommendation

Yahong Lian
Haotian Tian
Chunyao Song
Tingjian Ge

A multimodal recommendation system (MRS), which leverages rich multimodal information to model user preferences, has recently attracted significant research interest. Most existing MRSs focus primarily on developing sophisticated encoders for feature extraction, typically relying on simple aggregation of interaction-based features for final predictions. However, this conventional paradigm fails to account for the critical semantic difference between high- and low-rating interactions: while high ratings indicate user preference, low ratings explicitly convey dissatisfaction. Such oversight of negative feedback semantics may significantly limit the system’s recommendation performance. Recently, sign graphs—which model positive and negative feedback signals separately—have gained considerable attention. Inspired by this approach, we propose Sign-Aware Multimodal Graph Recommendation (SiMGR), a novel framework incorporating signed graphs into multimodal recommendation systems. SiMGR fuses multimodal features with signed interactions in a unified graph framework by integrating modality-specific representations and applying user-level thresholds to separate positive and negative subgraphs. A balanced pseudo-edge augmentation strategy is introduced to alleviate sparsity and enhance generalization. Experiments on three public multimodal recommendation datasets show that SiMGR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average 4.28% improvement in NDCG@20.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Sub-Interest-Aware Representation Uniformity for Recommender System

Ruijia Ma
Yahong Lian
Chunyao Song

In today’s information-rich era, users rely heavily on recommender systems to identify relevant content. Graph structures, renowned for their ability to model intricate user-content relationships, have become essential to these systems. However, the accuracy of recommendations hinges critically on the quality of node representations within these graphs. Personalized recommendations strive to enhance uniqueness by maximizing the dissimilarity between representations (known as uniformity) while simultaneously ensuring that the representations align closely with the content users engage with (dubbed as alignment). Nevertheless, balancing these conflicting objectives remains a challenge for optimal recommendation performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose an innovative approach called SIURec, which differs significantly from previous studies. Rather than relying on manual weight selection between uniformity and alignment and optimizing uniformity solely on the final representation, SIURec adopts an adaptive adjustment method that learns the optimal weight between uniformity and alignment automatically. By optimizing uniformity at every convolutional layer, SIURec captures users’ sub-interests more effectively, ultimately leading to improved recommendation accuracy. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that SIURec achieves superior learning of uniformity (with an average improvement of 4.26% in accuracy compared to eleven SOTA methods) and exhibits robustness across different hyperparameter settings.

PDF Details DOI