# Mixed Supervised Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15954 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15954/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Contrastive Multi-View Representation Learning on Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05582/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10783/) (2020)
- [Graph Representation Learning via Graphical Mutual Information Maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01169/) (2020)
- [Are Graph Augmentations Necessary? Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08679/) (2021)
- [G-Mixup: Graph Data Augmentation for Graph Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07179/) (2022)
- [Improving Graph Collaborative Filtering with Neighborhood-enriched Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06200/) (2022)
- [LightGCL: Simple Yet Effective Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08191/) (2023)
- [Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10632/) (2023)
- [Graph Transplant: Node Saliency-Guided Graph Mixup with Local Structure Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05639/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Alternative Experimental Settings for Evaluating Top-N Item Recommendation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04484/) (2020)
- [Improving Training Stability for Multitask Ranking Models in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09178/) (2023)
- [Deep Task-specific Bottom Representation Network for Multi-Task Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05996/) (2023)
- [Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equations-based method for Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12329/) (2023)
- [Dimension Independent Mixup for Hard Negative Sample in Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15905/) (2023)

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

- [LLMInit: A Free Lunch from Large Language Models for Selective Initialization of Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01814/) (2025)
- [Do We Really Need Graph Convolution During Training? Light Post-Training Graph-ODE for Efficient Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18910/) (2024)
- [Toward User Preference Alignment in LLM Recommendation via Explicit Context Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29141/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recommender systems (RecSys) play a vital role in online platforms, offering users personalized suggestions amidst vast information. Graph contrastive learning aims to learn from high-order collaborative filtering signals with unsupervised augmentation on the user-item bipartite graph, which predominantly relies on the multi-task learning framework involving both the pair-wise recommendation loss and the contrastive loss. This decoupled design can cause inconsistent optimization direction from different losses, which leads to longer convergence time and even sub-optimal performance. Besides, the self-supervised contrastive loss falls short in alleviating the data sparsity issue in RecSys as it learns to differentiate users/items from different views without providing extra supervised collaborative filtering signals during augmentations. In this paper, we propose Mixed Supervised Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation (MixSGCL) to address these concerns. MixSGCL originally integrates the training of recommendation and unsupervised contrastive losses into a supervised contrastive learning loss to align the two tasks within one optimization direction. To cope with the data sparsity issue, instead unsupervised augmentation, we further propose node-wise and edge-wise mixup to mine more direct supervised collaborative filtering signals based on existing user-item interactions. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MixSGCL surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving top performance on both accuracy and efficiency. It validates the effectiveness of MixSGCL with our coupled design on supervised graph contrastive learning.