Revisiting LightGCN: Unexpected Inflexibility, Inconsistency, and A Remedy Towards Improved Recommendation

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as effective tools in recommender systems. Among various GNN models, LightGCN is distinguished by its simplicity and outstanding performance. Its efficiency has led to widespread adoption across different domains, including social, bundle, and multimedia recommendations. In this paper, we thoroughly examine the mechanisms of LightGCN, focusing on its strategies for scaling embeddings, aggregating neighbors, and pooling embeddings across layers. Our analysis reveals that, contrary to expectations based on its design, LightGCN suffers from inflexibility and inconsistency when applied to real-world data.