Teach Me How to Denoise: A Universal Framework for Denoising Multi-modal Recommender Systems via Guided Calibration

Abstract: The surge in multimedia content has led to the development of Multi-Modal Recommender Systems (MMRecs), which use diverse modalities such as text, images, videos, and audio for more personalized recommendations. However, MMRecs struggle with noisy data caused by misalignment among modal content and the gap between modal semantics and recommendation semantics. Traditional denoising methods are inadequate due to the complexity of multi-modal data. To address this, we propose a universal guided in-sync distillation denoising framework for multi-modal recommendation (GUIDER), designed to improve MMRecs by denoising user feedback. Specifically, GUIDER uses a re-calibration strategy to identify clean and noisy interactions from modal content. It incorporates a Denoising Bayesian Personalized Ranking (DBPR) loss function to handle implicit user feedback. Finally, it applies a denoising knowledge distillation objective based on Optimal Transport distance to guide the alignment from modality representations to recommendation semantics. GUIDER can be seamlessly integrated into existing MMRecs methods as a plug-and-play solution. Experimental results on four public datasets demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Neon-Jing/Guider