Implicit Supervision-Assisted Graph Collaborative Filtering for Third-Party Library Recommendation

Third-party libraries (TPLs) play a crucial role in software development. Utilizing TPL recommender systems can aid software developers in promptly finding useful TPLs. A number of TPL recommendation approaches have been proposed and among them graph neural network (GNN)-based recommendation is attracting the most attention. However, GNN-based approaches generate node representations through multiple convolutional aggregations, which is prone to introducing noise, resulting in the over-smoothing issue. In addition, due to the high sparsity of labelled data, node representations may be biased in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, this paper presents a TPL recommendation method named Implicit Supervision-assisted Graph Collaborative Filtering (ISGCF). Specifically, it takes the App-TPL interaction relationships as input and employs a popularity-debiased method to generate denoised App and TPL graphs. This reduces the noise introduced during graph convolution and alleviates the over-smoothing issue. It also employs a novel implicitly-supervised loss function to exploit the labelled data to learn enhanced node representations. Extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset demonstrate that ISGCF achieves a significant performance advantage over other state-of-the-art TPL recommendation methods in Recall, NDCG and MAP. The experiments also validate the superiority of ISGCF in mitigating the over-smoothing problem.