R ² MR: Review and Rewrite Modality for Recommendation

With the explosive growth of online multimodal content, multimodal recommender systems(MRSs) have brought significant benefits to multimedia platforms. As MRSs evolve, many studies incorporate advanced technologies like graph neural networks(GNNs) and self-supervised learning(SSL), achieving remarkable results. However, these efforts still suffer from the quality disparity problem. It refers to the mixture of high and low quality across items' multiple modalities, owing to disparities in construction costs or design levels. These low-quality modalities often lack crucial details or introduce noise to the depiction of item, leading to insufficient or polluted item representation. Therefore, we propose a novel framework R2MR: Review and Rewrite Modality for Recommendation to tackle this issue. Specifically, R2MR is composed of two key components: Modality Reviewer and Modality Rewriter. The Modality Reviewer introduces a Consensus Review Mechanism. It performs perspective decomposition based on user representations and learns the consensus quality scores for modalities from diverse perspectives of multiple users. The Modality Rewriter proposes a Latent Mapping Model, which improves the quality of inferior modalities by learning various mapping patterns from high-quality modalities. Comprehensive experiments across three benchmark datasets reveal that R2MR substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average improvement of 9.20%. The implementations are available at https://github.com/gutang-97/R2MR.