  Intent modeling has attracted widespread attention in recommender systems. As
the core motivation behind user selection of items, intent is crucial for
elucidating recommendation results. The current mainstream modeling method is
to abstract the intent into unknowable but learnable shared or non-shared
parameters. Despite considerable progress, we argue that it still confronts the
following challenges: firstly, these methods only capture the coarse-grained
aspects of intent, ignoring the fact that user-item interactions will be
affected by collective and individual factors (e.g., a user may choose a movie
because of its high box office or because of his own unique preferences);
secondly, modeling believable intent is severely hampered by implicit feedback,
which is incredibly sparse and devoid of true semantics. To address these
challenges, we propose a novel recommendation framework designated as Bilateral
Intent-guided Graph Collaborative Filtering (BIGCF). Specifically, we take a
closer look at user-item interactions from a causal perspective and put forth
the concepts of individual intent-which signifies private preferences-and
collective intent-which denotes overall awareness. To counter the sparsity of
implicit feedback, the feature distributions of users and items are encoded via
a Gaussian-based graph generation strategy, and we implement the recommendation
process through bilateral intent-guided graph reconstruction re-sampling.
Finally, we propose graph contrastive regularization for both interaction and
intent spaces to uniformize users, items, intents, and interactions in a
self-supervised and non-augmented paradigm. Experimental results on three
real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of BIGCF compared with
existing solutions.
