Disentangled Negative Sampling for Collaborative Filtering

Negative sampling is essential for implicit collaborative filtering to generate negative samples from massive unlabeled data. Unlike existing strategies that consider items as a whole when selecting negative items, we argue that normally user interactions are mainly driven by some relevant, but not all, factors of items, leading to a new direction of negative sampling. In this paper, we introduce a novel disentangled negative sampling (DENS) method. We first disentangle the relevant and irrelevant factors of positive and negative items using a hierarchical gating module. Next, we design a factor-aware sampling strategy to identify the best negative samples by contrasting the relevant factors while keeping irrelevant factors similar. To ensure the credibility of the disentanglement, we propose to adopt contrastive learning and introduce four pairwise contrastive tasks, which enable to learn better disentangled representations of the relevant and irrelevant factors and remove the dependency on ground truth. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of DENS against several state-of-the-art competitors, achieving over 7% improvement over the strongest baseline in terms of Recall@20 and NDCG@20. Our code is publically available at https://github.com/Riwei-HEU/DENS .