Adaptive Preference Modeling via Explicit Indirect Relational Learning for Personalized Fashion Matching

Abstract

Personalized fashion complementary recommendation requires jointly modeling user preferences and item compatibility under sparse and multimodal data conditions. Existing approaches often capture higher-order relational signals implicitly through graph propagation or rely on direct interaction data, limiting their ability to explicitly model indirect preference and compatibility relationships. To address this limitation, we propose an Adaptive Preference with Contrastive Learning framework (APCL) that explicitly models both direct and indirect relational signals within a unified recommendation architecture. Specifically, APCL constructs indirect user-item and item-item relationships through a correlation-guided adaptive aggregation mechanism and represents them as dedicated personalization and compatibility views. To improve representation learning, we further introduce a functional view contrastive learning strategy that aligns direct and indirect preference representations and direct and indirect compatibility representations, encouraging consistency across relational contexts. By integrating multimodal visual and textual information with explicit indirect relational modeling, APCL captures richer semantic characteristics while improving robustness in sparse-interaction settings. Experiments on two benchmark fashion recommendation datasets demonstrate that APCL consistently outperforms representative baseline methods.