English

When Collaborative Filtering Meets Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2019-04-03 v2 Information Retrieval Machine Learning

Abstract

In this paper, we study a multi-step interactive recommendation problem, where the item recommended at current step may affect the quality of future recommendations. To address the problem, we develop a novel and effective approach, named CFRL, which seamlessly integrates the ideas of both collaborative filtering (CF) and reinforcement learning (RL). More specifically, we first model the recommender-user interactive recommendation problem as an agent-environment RL task, which is mathematically described by a Markov decision process (MDP). Further, to achieve collaborative recommendations for the entire user community, we propose a novel CF-based MDP by encoding the states of all users into a shared latent vector space. Finally, we propose an effective Q-network learning method to learn the agent's optimal policy based on the CF-based MDP. The capability of CFRL is demonstrated by comparing its performance against a variety of existing methods on real-world datasets.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.00715,
  title  = {When Collaborative Filtering Meets Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Yu Lei and Wenjie Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.00715},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:30:16.476Z