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arXiv · 2610.15523

Rethinking Evidence Modeling: Context-Coupled Graph Learning for Multimodal Recommendation

Mingqiao Zhang·Qiyao Peng·Yumeng Wang·Wenzhe Dong·Hongtao Liu·Jian Yang
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Abstract

Multimodal graph recommendation integrates observed interactions with item images and text to learn user preferences. These inputs constitute Semantic-Behavioral Evidence (SBE). Many existing graph methods incorporate collaborative and multimodal semantic relations, yet their aggregation and state updates remain context-separated, limiting the continuous composition of preference evidence across layers and the joint use of multiple sources. To address this limitation, we propose CC-MGRec, a context-coupled graph learning method that organizes SBE within a common graph learning context for cross-relation modeling and compositional propagation. Its context-coupled multimodal graph integrates user-item collaborative relations and item-item semantic relations, coordinating their message scales through joint normalization. Recommendation-grounded semantic calibration uses training behavior to adjust semantic neighbor weights while preserving normalized collaborative propagation coefficients. Collaborative-semantic compositional propagation updates shared node states layer by layer to continuously compose collaborative and multimodal semantic evidence, implicitly forming Preference Evidence Chains (PECs), including collaborative-semantic and visual-textual PECs. Joint execution of relation messages on the same shared node states within each layer preserves propagation outputs while reducing intermediate output processing and fusion overhead. We provide theoretical analysis of the proposed mechanisms. Experiments on three Amazon datasets demonstrate improved recommendation quality and faster inference during graph propagation.

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Mingqiao Zhang, Qiyao Peng, Yumeng Wang, Wenzhe Dong, Hongtao Liu, Jian Yang. 2026-10-11. Rethinking Evidence Modeling: Context-Coupled Graph Learning for Multimodal Recommendation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15523

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