Related papers: Off-Policy Evaluation of Probabilistic Identity Da…
A well-known problem when learning from user clicks are inherent biases prevalent in the data, such as position or trust bias. Click models are a common method for extracting information from user clicks, such as document relevance in web…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in user-facing applications, from providing medical consultations to job interview advice. Recent research suggests that these models are becoming increasingly proficient at inferring…
In a world increasingly reliant on artificial intelligence, it is more important than ever to consider the ethical implications of artificial intelligence on humanity. One key under-explored challenge is labeler bias, which can create…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) attempts to predict the performance of counterfactual policies using log data from a different policy. We extend its applicability by developing an OPE method for a class of both full support and deficient…
Decision making algorithms, in practice, are often trained on data that exhibits a variety of biases. Decision-makers often aim to take decisions based on some ground-truth target that is assumed or expected to be unbiased, i.e., equally…
A website browser cookie is a small file created by a web server upon visitation, which is placed in the user's browser directory to enhance the user's experience. However, first and third-party cookies have become a significant threat to…
Additive two-tower models are popular learning-to-rank methods for handling biased user feedback in industry settings. Recent studies, however, report a concerning phenomenon: training two-tower models on clicks collected by well-performing…
Browser fingerprinting can be used to identify and track users across the Web, even without cookies, by collecting attributes from users' devices to create unique "fingerprints". This technique and resulting privacy risks have been studied…
Many sequential decision-making systems leverage data collected using prior policies to propose a new policy. For critical applications, it is important that high-confidence guarantees on the new policy's behavior are provided before…
It is well known that the historical logs are used for evaluating and learning policies in interactive systems, e.g. recommendation, search, and online advertising. Since direct online policy learning usually harms user experiences, it is…
Today, targeted online advertising relies on unique identifiers assigned to users through third-party cookies--a practice at odds with user privacy. While the web and advertising communities have proposed solutions that we refer to as…
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…
Choice decisions made by users of online applications can suffer from biases due to the users' level of engagement. For instance, low engagement users may make random choices with no concern for the quality of items offered. This biased…
In online platforms, the impact of a treatment on an observed outcome may change over time as 1) users learn about the intervention, and 2) the system personalization, such as individualized recommendations, change over time. We introduce a…
As mobile app usage continues to rise, so does the generation of extensive user interaction data, which includes actions such as swiping, zooming, or the time spent on a screen. Apps often collect a large amount of this data and claim to…
Matching users based on mutual preferences is a fundamental aspect of services driven by reciprocal recommendations, such as job search and dating applications. Although A/B tests remain the gold standard for evaluating new policies in…
We present a new approach to the problems of evaluating and learning personalized decision policies from observational data of past contexts, decisions, and outcomes. Only the outcome of the enacted decision is available and the historical…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…
Ad-load balancing is a critical challenge in online advertising systems, particularly in the context of social media platforms, where the goal is to maximize user engagement and revenue while maintaining a satisfactory user experience. This…
Using offline datasets to evaluate conversational agents often fails to cover rare scenarios or to support testing new policies. This has motivated the use of controllable user simulators for targeted, counterfactual evaluation, typically…