Work place: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science, Chennai-603103, India
E-mail: palwininfant@gmail.com
Website:
Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence
Biography
Alwin Infant P., completed Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering at Manonmaniam Sundaranar University in 2004 and earned his Master of Technology in Information Technology from Anna University in 2009. He has since specialized in machine learning, data science and recommendation systems. Currently, pursuing his doctoral degree in Computer Science and Engineering Department at Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science, India. His major field of study includes recommender System and Machine Learning. He worked as an Assistant Professor at Loyola Institute of Technology and Sciences, India. He has 16 years of teaching experience. Alwin has published articles on Medical Imaging in journals such as Multimedia Tools and Applications and in several IEEE conferences. His primary research interest is in artificial intelligence, computer vision, deep learning, and predictive analytics. Mr. Alwin is a member of the Indian Society for Technical Education. He has received the Best Paper Award at the National Conference on Machine Learning.
By Alwin Infant P. P. Mohan Kumar
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijitcs.2026.03.09, Pub. Date: 8 Jun. 2026
Recommender system commonly suffers from data sparsity and cold-start problems, where user-item interactions hinder reliable preference learning. While recent Graph Neural Network based models such as LightGCN and NGCF effectively capture higher-order collaborative signals, they primarily rely on interaction-derived embeddings and remain sensitive to sparse environments. This paper Attribute Enabled Graph Neural Framework (AE-GNF) proposes a Semantic-Aware Graph Refinement Framework that integrates attribute-driven representation learning with graph-based collaborative propagation to address these limitations. The proposed method first encodes heterogeneous user and item attributes using semantic embedding modules to generate informative initial representations independent of interaction density. Dense sematic embeddings are generated using modality specific neural encoders including transformer based text encoder for descriptive attributes, a recurrent attention network for behavioral interaction sequences and temporal contextual feature encoder for metadata signals. These embeddings are then refined through a normalized graph propagation mechanism that jointly models structural connectivity and semantic similarity, enabling robust higher-order preference learning. Unlike conventional recommenders, the framework preserves attribute semantics during message passing and enables inductive cold-start recommendations, where embeddings for newly introduced users or items are generated directly from attributes without requiring prior interaction edges. Experimental evaluation conducted on publicly available benchmark datasets including MovieLens-1M, Amazon Electronics, Amazon Books, and Amazon Prime Movies and LastFM360 demonstrates consistent performance improvements over Matrix Factorization, content-based models, GraphSAGE and Neural Graph Collaborative Filtering (NGCF). Results show notable gains in ranking accuracy, diversity and robustness under varying sparsity levels. The proposed AE-GNF achieves improved recommendation performance reducing RMSE by 3.5 to 6.2% and improving NDCG@10 by 6-11% compared to graph-based baselines across benchmark datasets. The findings confirm that integrating semantic attribute encoding with graph refinement provides a scalable and effective solution for next-generation recommendation systems operating in sparse and heterogeneous environments.
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