CADMR: Cross-Attention and Disentangled Learning for Multimodal Recommender Systems (2412.02295v1)

Abstract: The increasing availability and diversity of multimodal data in recommender systems offer new avenues for enhancing recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction. However, these systems must contend with high-dimensional, sparse user-item rating matrices, where reconstructing the matrix with only small subsets of preferred items for each user poses a significant challenge. To address this, we propose CADMR, a novel autoencoder-based multimodal recommender system framework. CADMR leverages multi-head cross-attention mechanisms and Disentangled Learning to effectively integrate and utilize heterogeneous multimodal data in reconstructing the rating matrix. Our approach first disentangles modality-specific features while preserving their interdependence, thereby learning a joint latent representation. The multi-head cross-attention mechanism is then applied to enhance user-item interaction representations with respect to the learned multimodal item latent representations. We evaluate CADMR on three benchmark datasets, demonstrating significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.