Automatic self-supervised learning for social recommendations

Abstract

In recent years, researchers have leveraged social relations to enhance recommendation performance. However, most existing social recommendation methods require carefully designed auxiliary social tasks tailored to specific scenarios, which depend heavily on domain knowledge and expertise. To address this limitation, we propose Automatic Self-supervised Learning for Social Recommendations (AusRec), which integrates multiple self-supervised auxiliary tasks with an automatic weighting mechanism to adaptively balance their contributions through a meta-learning optimization framework. This design enables the model to automatically learn the optimal importance of each auxiliary task, thereby enhancing representation learning in social recommendations. Extensive experiments on several real-world datasets demonstrate that AusRec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 3.3%–10.7% in Recall@10 and 1.4%–7.1% in NDCG@10, validating its effectiveness and robustness across different recommendation scenarios. The code is available at: https://github.com/hexin5515/AusRec.