# POI Recommendation with LLM-Augmented Multi-Graph Learning and Contrastive Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16407 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.16407/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [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)
- [Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08108/) (2019)
- [Graph Neural Networks in Recommender Systems: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02260/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19860/) (2023)
- [KGAT: Knowledge Graph Attention Network for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07854/) (2019)
- [Self-supervised Graph Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10783/) (2020)
- [Are Graph Augmentations Necessary? Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08679/) (2021)
- [Improving Graph Collaborative Filtering with Neighborhood-enriched Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06200/) (2022)
- [A Tale of Two Graphs: Freezing and Denoising Graph Structures for Multimodal Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06924/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Point-of-Interest Recommendation: Models, Architectures, and Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02191/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendation models based on graph neural networks achieve strong performance by propagating collaborative signals over user-item interactions, yet they struggle with the cold-start problem, where items with few or no interactions are not represented. In this paper, we propose LLM-augmented Multi-Graph Contrastive Learning (LLM-MGCL), a multi-graph neural network that uses semantic and spatial information about items to extend the LightGCN backbone with two auxiliary item-item graphs: a semantic graph constructed from sentence embeddings of LLM-generated photo summaries and keywords, and a geographic graph derived from Haversine distances between business locations. Item embeddings are propagated over all three graphs in parallel, fused additively, and aligned across views through a bidirectional InfoNCE contrastive objective that connects behavioral, semantic, and spatial representations of the same items. Experiments on the Yelp Multimodal Recommendation Dataset show that LLM-MGCL outperforms classical collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, and interaction-only graph neural network baselines. It improves Recall@20 by 52.0% and NDCG@20 by 64.8% over LightGCN while performing on par with the strongest contrastive baseline, Self-supervised Graph Learning (SGL), which is also affected by the cold-start problem. An ablation study reveals that the cross-view contrastive alignment (CA) is the primary driver of these gains, with the best performance achieved when all three graphs are combined. Our results suggest that externally grounded, LLM-derived item knowledge can effectively compensate for missing collaborative signal and mitigate the item cold-start problem in POI recommendation.