AAAI 2026 Main Conference

January 24, 2026

Singapore, Singapore

Would you like to see your presentation here, made available to a global audience of researchers?
Add your own presentation or have us affordably record your next conference.

In recommender systems, recent advances highlight the critical role of alignment and uniformity (AU) in representation learning. Specifically, AU-based methods pull positive user-item pairs closer (alignment) and spread the overall representation distribution (uniformity), typically relying on observed positive samples. Despite their effectiveness, exist methods face two limitations: (1) noise issues have a more severe impact on AU-based methods in the absence of negative samples, leading to the capture of spurious signals such as misclicks or non-preferential behaviors; (2) data sparsity weakens the alignment of user-item representations, hindering reliable representation learning and harming recommendations for sparse users. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel recommendation framework named Constrained Alignment and Filtered Uniformity (CAFU). CAFU enhances robustness through Filtered Uniformity (FU) and improves performance under data sparsity via Constrained Alignment (CA). Specifically, FU adopts a threshold-based strategy to eliminate unreliable samples that degrade embedding quality, thereby strengthening robustness. In parallel, CA mitigates the impact of sparsity by masking low-confidence user-item pairs based on angular distance, leading to better recommendation for sparse users. Extensive experiments on three datasets and three backbones demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed framework.

Downloads

SlidesPaper

Next from AAAI 2026 Main Conference

S2-Boost: Synergistic Semantic Boosting for Coarse-to-Fine Ensemble Learning
technical paper

S2-Boost: Synergistic Semantic Boosting for Coarse-to-Fine Ensemble Learning

AAAI 2026 Main Conference

+3Feiping Nie
guanxiong he and 5 other authors

24 January 2026

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

Select topic of interest (you can select more than one)

PRESENTATIONS

  • All Presentations
  • For Librarians
  • Resource Center
  • Free Trial
Underline Science, Inc.
1216 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001, USA

© 2025 Underline - All rights reserved