When Recommendation Denoising Meets Popularity Bias: Understanding and Mitigating Their Interaction

Implicit feedback is the dominant data source for recommender systems, but behavioral logs are often contaminated by false-positive interactions caused by mis-clicks, biased exposure, and interface effects. Denoising recommendation methods improve robustness by down-weighting or filtering interactions suspected to be noisy, often relying on the small-loss heuristic. We revisit this heuristic through the lens of popularity bias. Tail-item positives can be harder to fit because they are sparsely observed, and thus may receive larger losses even when they reflect genuine user preference. Under such popularity-dependent loss patterns, monotone loss-based reweighting can suppress clean-but-hard tail signals and increase the head-tail imbalance in effective supervision. We formalize this interaction through the effective head-tail signal ratio induced by denoising weights and derive a conditional reallocation result: when the loss distribution of tail positives is right-shifted relative to that of head positives, small-loss reweighting increases the effective head-tail signal ratio compared with ERM. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Popularity-Aware Denoising (PAD), a lightweight plug-in framework that modulates denoising strength by item popularity. PAD applies stronger denoising to highly exposed items while being more conservative on tail items, preserving more clean-but-hard long-tail signals. Experiments on three datasets and three backbones show that PAD generally improves over representative denoising baselines and provides favorable accuracy-diversity tradeoffs, especially on MF-style recommenders.