Why do Semantically Unrelated Categories Appear in the Same Session?

Session-based recommendation has recently attracted more and more research efforts. Most existing approaches are intuitively proposed to discover users' potential preferences or interests from the anonymous session data. This apparently ignores the fact that these sequential behavior data usually reflect session user's potential demand, i.e., a semantic level factor, and therefore how to estimate underlying demands from a session has become a challenging task. To tackle the aforementioned issue, this paper proposes a novel demand-aware graph neural network model. Particularly, a demand modeling component is designed to extract the underlying multiple demands of each session. Then, the demand-aware graph neural network is designed to first construct session demand graphs and then learn the demand-aware item embeddings to make the recommendation. The mutual information loss is further designed to enhance the quality of the learnt embeddings. Extensive experiments have been performed on two real-world datasets and the proposed model achieves the SOTA model performance.