  Automatic bundle construction is a crucial prerequisite step in various
bundle-aware online services. Previous approaches are mostly designed to model
the bundling strategy of existing bundles. However, it is hard to acquire
large-scale well-curated bundle dataset, especially for those platforms that
have not offered bundle services before. Even for platforms with mature bundle
services, there are still many items that are included in few or even zero
bundles, which give rise to sparsity and cold-start challenges in the bundle
construction models. To tackle these issues, we target at leveraging multimodal
features, item-level user feedback signals, and the bundle composition
information, to achieve a comprehensive formulation of bundle construction.
Nevertheless, such formulation poses two new technical challenges: 1) how to
learn effective representations by optimally unifying multiple features, and 2)
how to address the problems of modality missing, noise, and sparsity problems
induced by the incomplete query bundles. In this work, to address these
technical challenges, we propose a Contrastive Learning-enhanced Hierarchical
Encoder method (CLHE). Specifically, we use self-attention modules to combine
the multimodal and multi-item features, and then leverage both item- and
bundle-level contrastive learning to enhance the representation learning, thus
to counter the modality missing, noise, and sparsity problems. Extensive
experiments on four datasets in two application domains demonstrate that our
method outperforms a list of SOTA methods. The code and dataset are available
at https://github.com/Xiaohao-Liu/CLHE.
