Lighter-X: An Efficient and Plug-and-play Strategy for Graph-based Recommendation through Decoupled Propagation

Abstract

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in recommendation systems. However, conventional graph-based recommenders, such as LightGCN, require maintaining embeddings of size $d$ for each node, resulting in a parameter complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n \times d)$, where $n$ represents the total number of users and items. This scaling pattern poses significant challenges for deployment on large-scale graphs encountered in real-world applications. To address this scalability limitation, we propose \textbf{Lighter-X}, an efficient and modular framework that can be seamlessly integrated with existing GNN-based recommender architectures. Our approach substantially reduces both parameter size and computational complexity while preserving the theoretical guarantees and empirical performance of the base models, thereby enabling practical deployment at scale. Specifically, we analyze the original structure and inherent redundancy in their parameters, identifying opportunities for optimization. Based on this insight, we propose an efficient compression scheme for the sparse adjacency structure and high-dimensional embedding matrices, achieving a parameter complexity of $\mathcal{O}(h \times d)$, where $h \ll n$. Furthermore, the model is optimized through a decoupled framework, reducing computational complexity during the training process and enhancing scalability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Lighter-X achieves comparable performance to baseline models with significantly fewer parameters. In particular, on large-scale interaction graphs with millions of edges, we are able to attain even better results with only 1\% of the parameter over LightGCN.