# MixDec Sampling: A Soft Link-based Sampling Method of Graph Neural Network for Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08161 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08161/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [DeepWalk: Online Learning of Social Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1403.6652/) (2014)
- [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)
- [FastGCN: Fast Learning with Graph Convolutional Networks via Importance Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10247/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Augmenting Data with Mixup for Sentence Classification: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08941/) (2019)
- [IRGAN: A Minimax Game for Unifying Generative and Discriminative Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.10513/) (2017)
- [On Sampling Strategies for Neural Network-based Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07881/) (2017)
- [Understanding Negative Sampling in Graph Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09863/) (2020)
- [KBGAN: Adversarial Learning for Knowledge Graph Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04071/) (2017)
- [GraphMixup: Improving Class-Imbalanced Node Classification on Graphs by Self-supervised Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11133/) (2021)
- [Simplify and Robustify Negative Sampling for Implicit Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03376/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Sampling and Training for Semi-Supervised Information Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04155/) (2018)
- [Global Mixup: Eliminating Ambiguity with Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02734/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Graph neural networks have been widely used in recent recommender systems, where negative sampling plays an important role. Existing negative sampling methods restrict the relationship between nodes as either hard positive pairs or hard negative pairs. This leads to the loss of structural information, and lacks the mechanism to generate positive pairs for nodes with few neighbors. To overcome limitations, we propose a novel soft link-based sampling method, namely MixDec Sampling, which consists of Mixup Sampling module and Decay Sampling module. The Mixup Sampling augments node features by synthesizing new nodes and soft links, which provides sufficient number of samples for nodes with few neighbors. The Decay Sampling strengthens the digestion of graph structure information by generating soft links for node embedding learning. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to model sampling relationships between nodes by soft links in GNN-based recommender systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MixDec Sampling can significantly and consistently improve the recommendation performance of several representative GNN-based models on various recommendation benchmarks.