Joint Multi-Modal Multi-Interest Profiling and Preference-Grounded Reasoning for Explainable Recommendation

Abstract

Explainable Recommendation (ER) aims to enhance recommendation transparency and prediction accuracy by providing faithful and persuasive explanations. However, Multi-Modal Multi-Interest Explainable Recommendation (MMER) is particularly challenging in two aspects: effectively utilizing diverse multi-modal information to construct reliable semantic evidence and precisely identifying the most relevant user interest to generate faithful explanations. Most previous methods fail to effectively exploit visual information to provide reliable evidence and primarily rely on a single unified representation of user preferences, making it difficult to distinguish diverse user interests and generate faithful explanations. To fill this gap, we propose Joint Multi-Modal Multi-Interest Profiling and Preference-Grounded Reasoning (PRIME) for solving the MMER problem. Specifically, PRIME first organizes items into interest-aware clusters to facilitate interest disentanglement. Based on these clusters, it constructs explicit multi-modal multi-interest user profiles and a comprehensive global item profile to capture fine-grained preferences and distinguish diverse user interests. Furthermore, PRIME performs preference-grounded reasoning by retrieving the most relevant user interest for each item, enabling faithful explanations and accurate predictions. Our experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that PRIME outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.