SimCGNN: Simple Contrastive Graph Neural Network for Session-based Recommendation

Abstract: Session-based recommendation (SBR) problem, which focuses on next-item prediction for anonymous users, has received increasingly more attention from researchers. Existing graph-based SBR methods all lack the ability to differentiate between sessions with the same last item, and suffer from severe popularity bias. Inspired by nowadays emerging contrastive learning methods, this paper presents a Simple Contrastive Graph Neural Network for Session-based Recommendation (SimCGNN). In SimCGNN, we first obtain normalized session embeddings on constructed session graphs. We next construct positive and negative samples of the sessions by two forward propagation and a novel negative sample selection strategy, and then calculate the constructive loss. Finally, session embeddings are used to give prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-word datasets show our SimCGNN achieves a significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods.