Related papers: Offline A/B testing for Recommender Systems
Many video-on-demand and music streaming services provide the user with a page consisting of several recommendation lists, i.e. widgets or swipeable carousels, each built with a specific criterion (e.g. most recent, TV series, etc.).…
Companies offering web services routinely run randomized online experiments to estimate the causal impact associated with the adoption of new features and policies on key performance metrics of interest. These experiments are used to…
Top-N recommendation, which aims to learn user ranking-based preference, has long been a fundamental problem in a wide range of applications. Traditional models usually motivate themselves by designing complex or tailored architectures…
Users of music streaming, video streaming, news recommendation, and e-commerce services often engage with content in a sequential manner. Providing and evaluating good sequences of recommendations is therefore a central problem for these…
Recommender systems have become integral to digital experiences, shaping user interactions and preferences across various platforms. Despite their widespread use, these systems often suffer from algorithmic biases that can lead to unfair…
The Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) problem consists of evaluating the performance of counterfactual policies with data collected by another one. To solve the OPE problem, we resort to estimators, which aim to estimate in the most accurate way…
Contextual bandit algorithms have become popular for online recommendation systems such as Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, and news recommendation in general. \emph{Offline} evaluation of the effectiveness of new algorithms in these applications is…
Recommender systems employ machine learning models to learn from historical data to predict the preferences of users. Deep neural network (DNN) models such as neural collaborative filtering (NCF) are increasingly popular. However, the…
Off-policy learning plays a pivotal role in optimizing and evaluating policies prior to the online deployment. However, during the real-time serving, we observe varieties of interventions and constraints that cause inconsistency between the…
Though it has been recognized that recommending serendipitous (i.e., surprising and relevant) items can be helpful for increasing users' satisfaction and behavioral intention, how to measure serendipity in the offline environment is still…
Information retrieval systems, such as online marketplaces, news feeds, and search engines, are ubiquitous in today's digital society. They facilitate information discovery by ranking retrieved items on predicted relevance, i.e. likelihood…
Recommender Systems (RSs) aim to provide personalized recommendations for users. A newly discovered bias, known as sentiment bias, uncovers a common phenomenon within Review-based RSs (RRSs): the recommendation accuracy of users or items…
Algorithmic risk assessments are increasingly used to help humans make decisions in high-stakes settings, such as medicine, criminal justice and education. In each of these cases, the purpose of the risk assessment tool is to inform…
Unbiased recommender learning (URL) and off-policy evaluation/learning (OPE/L) techniques are effective in addressing the data bias caused by display position and logging policies, thereby consistently improving the performance of…
Selecting the optimal recommender via online exploration-exploitation is catching increasing attention where the traditional A/B testing can be slow and costly, and offline evaluations are prone to the bias of history data. Finding the…
Most reinforcement learning practitioners evaluate their policies with online Monte Carlo estimators for either hyperparameter tuning or testing different algorithmic design choices, where the policy is repeatedly executed in the…
We present statistical methods for big data arising from online analytical processing, where large amounts of data arrive in streams and require fast analysis without storage/access to the historical data. In particular, we develop…
Auction-based recommender systems are prevalent in online advertising platforms, but they are typically optimized to allocate recommendation slots based on immediate expected return metrics, neglecting the downstream effects of…
We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. Off-policy evaluation is the task of evaluating the expected return of one policy with data generated by a different, behavior policy. Importance sampling is a…
Learning from human feedback has been central to recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Since the collection of human feedback is costly, a natural question to ask is if the new feedback always needs to collected.…