The DOI matches its Crossref record; 200 of the 200 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A Survey of Graph Neural Networks for Recommender Systems: Challenges, Methods, and Directions
Open accessAbstract
Recommender system is one of the most important information services on today’s Internet. Recently, graph neural networks have become the new state-of-the-art approach to recommender systems. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature on graph neural network-based recommender systems. We first introduce the background and the history of the development of both recommender systems and graph neural networks. For recommender systems, in general, there are four aspects for categorizing existing works: stage, scenario, objective, and application. For graph neural networks, the existing methods consist of two categories: spectral models and spatial ones. We then discuss the motivation of applying graph neural networks into recommender systems, mainly consisting of the high-order connectivity, the structural property of data and the enhanced supervision signal. We then systematically analyze the challenges in graph construction, embedding propagation/aggregation, model optimization, and computation efficiency. Afterward and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a multitude of existing works of graph neural network-based recommender systems, following the taxonomy above. Finally, we raise discussions on the open problems and promising future directions in this area. We summarize the representative papers along with their code repositories in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/GNN-Recommender-Systems .
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Hochreiter, S., & Schmidhuber, J. (1997) · Neural Computation · doi:10.1162/neco.1997.9.8.1735 · Cited by 102,318
Densely Connected Convolutional Networks
Huang, G., Liu, Z., Van Der Maaten, L., & Weinberger, K. Q. (2017) · 2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2017.243 · Cited by 48,566
Going deeper with convolutions
Szegedy, C., Liu, W., Jia, Y., Sermanet, P., Reed, S., Anguelov, D., Erhan, D., Vanhoucke, V., & Rabinovich, A. (2015) · 2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) · doi:10.1109/cvpr.2015.7298594 · Cited by 48,562
Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space
Mikolov, T., Chen, K., Corrado, G., & Dean, J. (2013) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1301.3781 · Cited by 26,568
Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J. M. (2001) · Annual Review of Sociology · doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.27.1.415 · Cited by 18,567
Matrix Factorization Techniques for Recommender Systems
Koren, Y., Bell, R., & Volinsky, C. (2009) · Computer · doi:10.1109/mc.2009.263 · Cited by 11,673
A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks
Wu, Z., Pan, S., Chen, F., Long, G., Zhang, C., & Yu, P. S. (2021) · IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems · doi:10.1109/tnnls.2020.2978386 · Cited by 11,000
node2vec: Scalable Feature Learning for Networks
Grover, A., & Leskovec, J. (2016) · Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining · doi:10.1145/2939672.2939754 · Cited by 10,926
Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs
Hamilton, W. L., Ying, R., & Leskovec, J. (2017) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1706.02216 · Cited by 10,639
DeepWalk: online learning of social representations
Perozzi, B., Al-Rfou, R., & Skiena, S. (2014) · Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining · doi:10.1145/2623330.2623732 · Cited by 10,123
Cited by
Recommender Systems in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs)
Zhao, Z., Fan, W., Li, J., Liu, Y., Mei, X., Wang, Y., Wen, Z., Wang, F., Zhao, X., Tang, J., et al. (2024) · IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering · doi:10.1109/tkde.2024.3392335 · Cited by 481
A Survey of Graph Neural Networks for Social Recommender Systems
Sharma, K., Lee, Y.-C., Nambi, S., Salian, A., Shah, S., Kim, S.-W., & Kumar, S. (2024) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3661821 · Cited by 268
Metadata
- Authors
- Gao, C., Zheng, Y., Li, N., Li, Y., Qin, Y., Piao, J., Quan, Y., Chang, J., Jin, D., He, X., & Li, Y.
- Venue
- ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems
- Published
- 2023-03-03
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 1-51
- ISSN
- 2770-6699 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4315977496
- Cited by
- 756
- References
- 200
- FWCI
- 176.95
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Survey of Graph Neural Networks for Recommender Systems: Challenges, Methods, and Directions. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/3568022
- The paper
- Gao, C., Zheng, Y., Li, N., Li, Y., Qin, Y., Piao, J., Quan, Y., Chang, J., Jin, D., He, X., & Li, Y. (2023). A Survey of Graph Neural Networks for Recommender Systems: Challenges, Methods, and Directions. ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3568022
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
