# RDGCL: Reaction-Diffusion Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.16563 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16563/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13902/) (2020)
- [LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02126/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08108/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [Measuring and Relieving the Over-smoothing Problem for Graph Neural Networks from the Topological View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03211/) (2019)
- [Deep Graph Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04131/) (2020)
- [Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14945/) (2020)
- [GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09963/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10783/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Graph Neural Networks: All We Have is Low-Pass Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09550/) (2019)
- [GRAND: Graph Neural Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10934/) (2021)
- [Trainable Nonlinear Reaction Diffusion: A Flexible Framework for Fast and Effective Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.02848/) (2015)
- [Are Graph Augmentations Necessary? Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08679/) (2021)
- [SimGRACE: A Simple Framework for Graph Contrastive Learning without Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03104/) (2022)
- [Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07532/) (2019)
- [DiffCSE: Difference-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10298/) (2022)
- [Intriguing Properties of Contrastive Losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02803/) (2020)
- [Revisiting Graph based Collaborative Filtering: A Linear Residual Graph Convolutional Network Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.10167/) (2020)
- [Continuous Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00967/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Data Augmentation for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03158/) (2021)
- [UltraGCN: Ultra Simplification of Graph Convolutional Networks for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15114/) (2021)
- [Improving Graph Collaborative Filtering with Neighborhood-enriched Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06200/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SCONE: A Novel Stochastic Sampling to Generate Contrastive Views and Hard Negative Samples for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00287/) (2024)
- [SVD-AE: Simple Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04746/) (2024)
- [TV-Rec: Time-Variant Convolutional Filter for Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25259/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a promising technique for improving recommender systems, addressing the challenge of data sparsity by using self-supervised signals from raw data. Integration of CL with graph convolutional network (GCN)-based collaborative filterings (CFs) has been explored in recommender systems. However, current CL-based recommendation models heavily rely on low-pass filters and graph augmentations. In this paper, inspired by the reaction-diffusion equation, we propose a novel CL method for recommender systems called the reaction-diffusion graph contrastive learning model (RDGCL). We design our own GCN for CF based on the equations of diffusion, i.e., low-pass filter, and reaction, i.e., high-pass filter. Our proposed CL-based training occurs between reaction and diffusion-based embeddings, so there is no need for graph augmentations. Experimental evaluation on 5 benchmark datasets demonstrates that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art CL-based recommendation models. By enhancing recommendation accuracy and diversity, our method brings an advancement in CL for recommender systems.