HGT4REC: HYPERBOLIC GRAPH TRANSFORMER FOR SEQUENTIAL AND SOCIAL RECOMMENDATION
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55766/sujst11821Keywords:
Gated Recurrent Unit, Graph Transformer, Hyperbolic Geometry, Sequential Recommendation, Social RecommendationAbstract
Sequential behaviors and social ties jointly shape user preferences; however, most prior work models them in isolation and relies on shallow fusion in Euclidean space, which struggles to capture temporal drift and hierarchical social structure. We propose a novel framework; HGT4Rec, a Hyperbolic Graph Transformer for Sequential and Social Recommendation. A graph transformer encodes item-transition dependencies to track evolving preferences along the sequence, while a hyperbolic transformer operates on the social graph to represent long-range and hierarchical influence. We further introduce FusionGRU, an adaptive gating module that integrates the two representations into a unified preference state for Top-K prediction. Experiments on Yelp, iFashion, LastFM show that HGT4Rec delivers substantial improvements over the strongest baseline, achieving +348.22% / +314.86%, +383.21% / +210.19%, and +90.85% / +9.83% in Recall@10 and NDCG@10, respectively. Our results demonstrate the value of combining graph transformers with hyperbolic space modeling and the gated fusion for next-item recommendation in sequential and social settings (our code).
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Copyright (c) 2026 Rungthip Cobal, Jintana Polsri, Phatthira Keawkerd, Nikorn Kannikaklang, Poorivat Kampeerapaappat, Supasee Duangsai, Suratep Pangerd, Natratanon Kanraweekultana, Wassana Duangmeun, Jessadaporn Yanuphrom, Piranun Chantavirod, Sukanya Kittikhunngam, Suphattana Tachochalalai, Chinapat Sakunrasrisuay

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