Related papers: Optimizing an Utility Function for Exploration / E…

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend relevant items to users by eliciting user preference through natural language conversation. Prior work often utilizes external knowledge graphs for items' semantic information, a…

Resource allocation plays a critical role in minimizing cycle time and improving the efficiency of business processes. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful technique to optimize resource allocation policies…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed significant advances in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, effectively managing the exploration and exploitation trade-off remains a…

In reinforcement learning (RL), an agent must explore an initially unknown environment in order to learn a desired behaviour. When RL agents are deployed in real world environments, safety is of primary concern. Constrained Markov decision…

The exploration-exploitation (EE) trade-off is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs). With Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), training tends to be exploitation driven: entropy decreases…

Optimizing objective functions subject to constraints is fundamental in many real-world applications. However, these constraints are often not readily defined and must be inferred from expert agent behaviors, a problem known as Inverse…

Recommender systems must balance personalization, diversity, and robustness to cold-start scenarios to remain effective in dynamic content environments. This paper introduces an adaptive, exploration-based recommendation framework that…

We study the design of loss functions for click-through rates (CTR) to optimize (social) welfare in advertising auctions. Existing works either only focus on CTR predictions without consideration of business objectives (e.g., welfare) in…

Recommender systems are software applications that help users to find items of interest in situations of information overload. Current research often assumes a one-shot interaction paradigm, where the users' preferences are estimated based…

Many real-world problems can be reduced to combinatorial optimization on a graph, where the subset or ordering of vertices that maximize some objective function must be found. With such tasks often NP-hard and analytically intractable,…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) models have continually evolved to navigate the exploration - exploitation trade-off in uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this study, I leverage the principles of stochastic thermodynamics and system…

Ranking is a crucial module using in the recommender system. In particular, the ranking module using in our YoungTao recommendation scenario is to provide an ordered list of items to users, to maximize the click number throughout the…

In this paper, we study collaborative filtering in an interactive setting, in which the recommender agents iterate between making recommendations and updating the user profile based on the interactive feedback. The most challenging problem…

Recommendation systems (RSs) are increasingly used to guide job seekers on online platforms, yet the algorithms currently deployed are typically optimized for predictive objectives such as clicks, applications, or hires, rather than job…

We study the problem of contextual dynamic pricing with a linear demand model. We propose a novel localized exploration-then-commit (LetC) algorithm which starts with a pure exploration stage, followed by a refinement stage that explores…

Traditional ranking systems optimize offline proxy objectives that rely on oversimplified assumptions about user behavior, often neglecting factors such as position bias and item diversity. Consequently, these models fail to improve true…

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs)aim to engage users in dialogue to provide tailored recommendations. While traditional CRSs focus on eliciting preferences and retrieving items, real-world e-commerce interactions involve more…

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend high-quality items to users through interactive conversations. Although several efforts have been made for CRS, two major issues still remain to be solved. First, the conversation…

We propose a new problem setting to study the sequential interactions between a recommender system and a user. Instead of assuming the user is omniscient, static, and explicit, as the classical practice does, we sketch a more realistic user…

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…