Beyond Observed Auxiliary Relations: Environment-Conditioned Modeling for Multi-Behavior Recommendation

Abstract

Multi-behavior recommendation (MBR) leverages auxiliary behavioral signals, such as clicks and add-to-cart, to enhance target behavior prediction like purchases. While recent graph neural network-based approaches have achieved strong performance by systematically propagating auxiliary behavior signals, they still suffer from two fundamental challenges inherent to auxiliary behaviors: (1) missing auxiliary signals, which hinder generalization to items without auxiliary observations, and (2) unreliable auxiliary signals, which amplify noise misaligned with the target behavior. To address these challenges in a unified manner, we propose BOAR, an environment-conditioned MBR framework that addresses missing and unreliable auxiliary signals through two complementary modules conditioned on auxiliary observability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BOAR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 7.82% gains in HR@10 overall and up to 44.2% gains for target items without auxiliary observations, highlighting its ability to capture hidden preferences beyond observed auxiliary relations. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LSH0411/BOAR.