# A Contrastive Framework with User, Item and Review Alignment for Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11963/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Toward User Preference Alignment in LLM Recommendation via Explicit Context Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29141/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning effective latent representations for users and items is the cornerstone of recommender systems. Traditional approaches rely on user-item interaction data to map users and items into a shared latent space, but the sparsity of interactions often poses challenges. While leveraging user reviews could mitigate this sparsity, existing review-aware recommendation models often exhibit two key limitations. First, they typically rely on reviews as additional features, but reviews are not universal, with many users and items lacking them. Second, such approaches do not integrate reviews into the user-item space, leading to potential divergence or inconsistency among user, item, and review representations. To overcome these limitations, our work introduces a Review-centric Contrastive Alignment Framework for Recommendation (ReCAFR), which incorporates reviews into the core learning process, ensuring alignment among user, item, and review representations within a unified space. Specifically, we leverage two self-supervised contrastive strategies that not only exploit review-based augmentation to alleviate sparsity, but also align the tripartite representations to enhance robustness. Empirical studies on public benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ReCAFR.