# Causal Incremental Graph Convolution for Recommender System Retraining

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06889 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06889/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Simplifying Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07153/) (2019)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01973/) (2018)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [Graph Neural Networks for Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07243/) (2019)
- [Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08108/) (2019)
- [Personalized Top-N Sequential Recommendation via Convolutional Sequence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07426/) (2018)
- [Predicting Dynamic Embedding Trajectory in Temporal Interaction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01207/) (2019)
- [EvolveGCN: Evolving Graph Convolutional Networks for Dynamic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10191/) (2019)
- [KGAT: Knowledge Graph Attention Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07854/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual VQA: A Cause-Effect Look at Language Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04315/) (2020)
- [Long-Tailed Classification by Keeping the Good and Removing the Bad Momentum Causal Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12991/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Neural Networks with Top-k Gains for Session-based Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03847/) (2017)
- [A Meta-Transfer Objective for Learning to Disentangle Causal Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.10912/) (2019)
- [Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing for Robust Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06576/) (2020)
- [How Algorithmic Confounding in Recommendation Systems Increases Homogeneity and Decreases Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11214/) (2017)
- [Distilling Causal Effect of Data in Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01737/) (2021)
- [Causal Intervention for Leveraging Popularity Bias in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06067/) (2021)
- [Causal Attention for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03493/) (2021)
- [Visual Commonsense R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12204/) (2020)
- [Fast Matrix Factorization for Online Recommendation with Implicit Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05024/) (2017)
- [Model-Agnostic Counterfactual Reasoning for Eliminating Popularity Bias in Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15363/) (2020)
- [Deconfounded Video Moment Retrieval with Causal Intervention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01534/) (2021)
- [Session-based Social Recommendation via Dynamic Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09362/) (2019)
- [AutoDebias: Learning to Debias for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04170/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Continual Graph Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12230/) (2023)
- [Causality-inspired Discriminative Feature Learning in Triple Domains for Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12519/) (2024)
- [Continual Learning on Graphs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06330/) (2024)
- [Continual Learning for Smart City: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00983/) (2024)
- [Exploring Causal Learning through Graph Neural Networks: An In-depth Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.14994/) (2023)
- [From Cluster Assumption to Graph Convolution: Graph-based Semi-Supervised Learning Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13599/) (2023)
- [Complex-Value Spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks and its Applications to Electric Power Systems AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08485/) (2022)
- [Graph Neural Network with Two Uplift Estimators for Label-Scarcity Individual Uplift Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06489/) (2024)
- [From Aggregation to Selection: User-Validated Distributed Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21388/) (2025)
- [A Comparative Analysis of Bias Amplification in Graph Neural Network Approaches for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07639/) (2023)
- [Master-slave Deep Architecture for Top-K Multi-armed Bandits with Non-linear Bandit Feedback and Diversity Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12680/) (2023)
- [Capturing and Anticipating User Intents in Data Analytics via Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01023/) (2024)
- [MEGG: Replay via Maximally Extreme GGscore in Incremental Learning for Neural Recommendation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.07319/) (2025)
- [CIRR: Causal-Invariant Retrieval-Augmented Recommendation with Faithful Explanations under Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18683/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-world recommender system needs to be regularly retrained to keep with the new data. In this work, we consider how to efficiently retrain graph convolution network (GCN) based recommender models, which are state-of-the-art techniques for collaborative recommendation. To pursue high efficiency, we set the target as using only new data for model updating, meanwhile not sacrificing the recommendation accuracy compared with full model retraining. This is non-trivial to achieve, since the interaction data participates in both the graph structure for model construction and the loss function for model learning, whereas the old graph structure is not allowed to use in model updating. Towards the goal, we propose a textitCausal Incremental Graph Convolution approach, which consists of two new operators named textitIncremental Graph Convolution (IGC) and textitColliding Effect Distillation (CED) to estimate the output of full graph convolution. In particular, we devise simple and effective modules for IGC to ingeniously combine the old representations and the incremental graph and effectively fuse the long-term and short-term preference signals. CED aims to avoid the out-of-date issue of inactive nodes that are not in the incremental graph, which connects the new data with inactive nodes through causal inference. In particular, CED estimates the causal effect of new data on the representation of inactive nodes through the control of their collider. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate both accuracy gains and significant speed-ups over the existing retraining mechanism.