Causal Structure Representation Learning of Unobserved Confounders in Latent Space for Recommendation
Hangtong Xu, Yuanbo Xu, Chaozhuo Li, Fuzhen Zhuang · ACM Transactions on Information Systems · 2025
Inferring user preferences from users’ historical feedback is a valuable problem in recommender systems. Conventional approaches often rely on the assumption that user preferences in the feedback data are equivalent to the real user preferences without additional noise, which simplifies the problem modeling. However, there are various confounders during user–item interactions, such as weather and even the recommendation system itself. Therefore, neglecting the influence of confounders will result in inaccurate user preferences and suboptimal performance of the model. Furthermore, the unobservability of confounders poses a challenge in further addressing the problem. Along these lines, we refine the problem and propose a more rational solution to mitigate the influence of unobserved confounders. Specifically, we consider the influence of unobserved confounders, disentangle them from user preferences in the latent space, and employ causal graphs to model their interdependencies without specific labels. By ingeniously combining local and global causal graphs, we capture the user-specific effects of confounders on user preferences. Finally, we propose our model based on Variational Autoencoders, named Causal Structure Aware Variational Autoencoders (CSA-VAE) and theoretically demonstrate the identifiability of the obtained causal graph. We conducted extensive experiments on one synthetic dataset and nine real-world datasets with different scales, including three unbiased datasets and six normal datasets, where the average performance boost against several state-of-the-art baselines achieves up to 9.55%, demonstrating the superiority of our model. Furthermore, users can control their recommendation list by manipulating the learned causal representations of confounders, generating potentially more diverse recommendation results. Our code is available at Code-link ( https://github.com/MICLab-Rec/CSA ).