Abstract
Contextual information, capturing the circumstances of a user-item interaction, is central to recommender systems. Prior work draws context from location, time, or reviews, but not images; multimodal recommender systems mainly use images to enrich item or user representations, not identify situational context. We propose a new representation of context derived from images, spanning physical, social, and modal categories learned via a vision-language model. We introduce ICE-Fuse, a pipeline for evaluating this representation that fuses these categories and integrates them into a context-aware recommender system, using TripAdvisor data and Review-aware Graph Contrastive Learning as the recommendation algorithm. Image context does not outperform established signals standalone, but improves them combined, indicating complementary information. Semantic analysis shows image- and review-derived context capture distinct aspects of the interaction, positioning images as complementary context.
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Publication details
- Journal
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Cordova, T., Geva, T., & Unger, M. (2026). Seeing the Context: Enhancing Recommender Systems with Image-Derived Contextual Signals. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/seeing-the-context-enhancing-recommender-systems-with-image-derived-contextual-signals
MLA 9
Cordova, Tal, et al. "Seeing the Context: Enhancing Recommender Systems with Image-Derived Contextual Signals." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/seeing-the-context-enhancing-recommender-systems-with-image-derived-contextual-signals.
Chicago (author–date)
Cordova, Tal, Tomer Geva, and Moshe Unger. 2026. "Seeing the Context: Enhancing Recommender Systems with Image-Derived Contextual Signals." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/seeing-the-context-enhancing-recommender-systems-with-image-derived-contextual-signals.
Harvard
Cordova, T., Geva, T. and Unger, M. (2026) 'Seeing the Context: Enhancing Recommender Systems with Image-Derived Contextual Signals', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/seeing-the-context-enhancing-recommender-systems-with-image-derived-contextual-signals.
Vancouver
Cordova T, Geva T, Unger M. Seeing the Context: Enhancing Recommender Systems with Image-Derived Contextual Signals. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/seeing-the-context-enhancing-recommender-systems-with-image-derived-contextual-signals
IEEE
T. Cordova, T. Geva, and M. Unger, "Seeing the Context: Enhancing Recommender Systems with Image-Derived Contextual Signals," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/seeing-the-context-enhancing-recommender-systems-with-image-derived-contextual-signals.