# VRKG4Rec: Virtual Relational Knowledge Graphs for Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.01089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01089/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Graph Neural Networks in Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02260/) (2020)
- [KGAT: Knowledge Graph Attention Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07854/) (2019)
- [Neural Factorization Machines for Sparse Predictive Analytics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05027/) (2017)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Graph-Based Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00911/) (2020)
- [RippleNet: Propagating User Preferences on the Knowledge Graph for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03467/) (2018)
- [DKN: Deep Knowledge-Aware Network for News Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08284/) (2018)
- [Knowledge Graph Convolutional Networks for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12575/) (2019)
- [Knowledge-aware Graph Neural Networks with Label Smoothness Regularization for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04413/) (2019)
- [Learning Intents behind Interactions with Knowledge Graph for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07057/) (2021)
- [Unifying Knowledge Graph Learning and Recommendation: Towards a Better Understanding of User Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06236/) (2019)
- [Multi-Task Feature Learning for Knowledge Graph Enhanced Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08907/) (2019)
- [Jointly Learning Explainable Rules for Recommendation with Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03714/) (2019)
- [Learning Heterogeneous Knowledge Base Embeddings for Explainable Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03352/) (2018)
- [Personalized Food Recommendation as Constrained Question Answering over a Large-scale Food Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01775/) (2021)
- [Graph Spring Network and Informative Anchor Selection for Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09502/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Incorporating knowledge graph as side information has become a new trend in recommendation systems. Recent studies regard items as entities of a knowledge graph and leverage graph neural networks to assist item encoding, yet by considering each relation type individually. However, relation types are often too many and sometimes one relation type involves too few entities. We argue that it is not efficient nor effective to use every relation type for item encoding. In this paper, we propose a VRKG4Rec model (Virtual Relational Knowledge Graphs for Recommendation), which explicitly distinguish the influence of different relations for item representation learning. We first construct virtual relational graphs (VRKGs) by an unsupervised learning scheme. We also design a local weighted smoothing (LWS) mechanism for encoding nodes, which iteratively updates a node embedding only depending on the embedding of its own and its neighbors, but involve no additional training parameters. We also employ the LWS mechanism on a user-item bipartite graph for user representation learning, which utilizes encodings of items with relational knowledge to help training representations of users. Experiment results on two public datasets validate that our VRKG4Rec model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The implementations are available at https://github.com/lulu0913/VRKG4Rec.