Unified Heterogeneous Hypergraph Construction for Incomplete Multimedia Recommendation

In the dynamic environment of multimedia-sharing platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter) and TikTok, multimedia recommendation systems have been widely used to help users discover items of interest. However, traditional approaches often fall short, when the item modalities are incomplete, a common issue in real-world scenarios. To this end, we introduce the unified heterogeneous Hypergraph construction for the Incomplete multimedia REcommendation ( HIRE ), a novel framework designed to jointly learn a heterogeneous hypergraph and perform accurate recommendations under incomplete scenarios. HIRE first initializes the unified heterogeneous hypergraph for modality completion and employs self-supervised learning aligned with the contrastive text-centered view for multimedia recommendation. Such integration effectively handles the challenges posed by incomplete modalities, leading to improved recommendation accuracy. Furthermore, we find that the hypergraph directly learned from the HIRE is a dense structure which can be inaccurate and coarse. Therefore, we devise the HIRE framework with Sparse constraint named HIRES , which uniquely integrates optimal transport and a \(\ell_{2,1}\) -norm to refine the hypergraph structure. Our extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate the superiority of HIRES in addressing incomplete modalities, establishing it as a powerful tool for personalized multimedia recommendations.