PopDCL: Popularity-aware Debiased Contrastive Loss for Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is the basic method for recommendation with implicit feedback. Recently, various state-of-the-art CF integrates graph neural networks. However, they often suffer from popularity bias, causing recommendations to deviate from users' genuine preferences. Additionally, several contrastive learning methods based on the in-batch sample strategy have been proposed to train the CF model effectively, but they are prone to suffering from sample bias. To address this problem, debiased contrastive loss has been employed in the recommendation, but instead of personalized debiasing, it treats each user equally. In this paper, we propose a popularity-aware debiased contrastive loss for CF, which can adaptively correct the positive and negative scores based on the popularity of users and items. Our approach aims to reduce the negative impact of popularity and sample bias simultaneously. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of the proposed method and reveal the relationship between popularity and gradient, which justifies the correction strategy. We extensively evaluate our method on three public benchmarks over balanced and imbalanced settings. The results demonstrate its superiority over the existing debiased strategies, not only on the entire datasets but also when segmenting the datasets based on item popularity.