# SimCGNN: Simple Contrastive Graph Neural Network for Session-based Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.03997 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03997/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [BERT4Rec: Sequential Recommendation with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06690/) (2019)
- [Gated Graph Sequence Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05493/) (2015)
- [Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06939/) (2015)
- [Session-based Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00855/) (2018)
- [Neural Attentive Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04725/) (2017)
- [Fusing Similarity Models with Markov Chains for Sparse Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.09152/) (2016)
- [Improved Recurrent Neural Networks for Session-based Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08117/) (2016)
- [Global Context Enhanced Graph Neural Networks for Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05081/) (2021)
- [Self-Supervised Hypergraph Convolutional Networks for Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06852/) (2020)
- [Rethinking the Item Order in Session-based Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11942/) (2019)
- [TAGNN: Target Attentive Graph Neural Networks for Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02844/) (2020)
- [NISER: Normalized Item and Session Representations to Handle Popularity Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04276/) (2019)
- [Disentangled Graph Neural Networks for Session-based Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03482/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Session-based recommendation (SBR) problem, which focuses on next-item prediction for anonymous users, has received increasingly more attention from researchers. Existing graph-based SBR methods all lack the ability to differentiate between sessions with the same last item, and suffer from severe popularity bias. Inspired by nowadays emerging contrastive learning methods, this paper presents a Simple Contrastive Graph Neural Network for Session-based Recommendation (SimCGNN). In SimCGNN, we first obtain normalized session embeddings on constructed session graphs. We next construct positive and negative samples of the sessions by two forward propagation and a novel negative sample selection strategy, and then calculate the constructive loss. Finally, session embeddings are used to give prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-word datasets show our SimCGNN achieves a significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods.