Do All Nodes Benefit Equally from Knowledge Graphs? Adaptive Node-Aware KG Fusion for Recommendation

Abstract

KG-aware recommendation has been widely studied to alleviate data sparsity by using knowledge graphs (KGs), which represent items, entities, and their relations as graphs and provide item-side knowledge. However, existing methods incorporate item knowledge without considering how much each user or item node should rely on it. As a result, they apply KG signals indiscriminately across nodes, even to nodes whose collaborative filtering (CF) signals from the interaction graph (IG) are already reliable. In this paper, we propose AdaKG (Adaptive Node-Aware KG Fusion), a novel KG-aware recommendation method that adaptively adjusts the contribution of auxiliary knowledge for each node. Since user-item interactions and item knowledge provide different types of signals, directly mixing them can distort the CF signals. To avoid this, AdaKG separately encodes the IG and KG with view-specific encoders, allowing each view to capture its own information. It then estimates how strongly each node should rely on item knowledge by measuring the stability of its CF signals under small adversarial perturbations, assigning a larger KG contribution to less stable nodes. Finally, AdaKG adaptively aligns the IG and KG embeddings in a shared space and fuses them according to the estimated node-wise reliance. Through experiments, we show that AdaKG achieves strong performance compared with its baselines and the effectiveness of our adaptive fusion strategy.