Related papers: Value-aware Recommendation based on Reinforced Pro…

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

In reinforcement learning, Return, which is the weighted accumulated future rewards, and Value, which is the expected return, serve as the objective that guides the learning of the policy. In classic RL, return is defined as the…

Different from shopping at retail stores, consumers on e-commerce platforms usually cannot touch or try products before purchasing, which means that they have to make decisions when they are uncertain about the outcome (e.g., satisfaction…

The majority of existing recommender systems rely on user ratings, which are limited by the lack of user collaboration and the sparsity problem. To address these issues, this study proposes a behavior-based recommender system that leverages…

Recommender systems aim to recommend the most suitable items to users from a large number of candidates. Their computation cost grows as the number of user requests and the complexity of services (or models) increases. Under the limitation…

Modern recommender systems excel at optimizing search result relevance for e-commerce platforms. While maintaining this relevance, platforms seek opportunities to maximize revenue through search result adjustments. To address the trade-off…

Recommendations are commonly used to modify user's natural behavior, for example, increasing product sales or the time spent on a website. This results in a gap between the ultimate business objective and the classical setup where…

Recommender systems have been widely applied in different real-life scenarios to help us find useful information. In particular, Reinforcement Learning (RL) based recommender systems have become an emerging research topic in recent years,…

Reinforcement learning has gained wide popularity as a technique for simulation-driven approximate dynamic programming. A less known aspect is that the very reasons that make it effective in dynamic programming can also be leveraged for…

In session-based or sequential recommendation, it is important to consider a number of factors like long-term user engagement, multiple types of user-item interactions such as clicks, purchases etc. The current state-of-the-art supervised…

We study how standard auction objectives in sponsored search markets change with refinements in the prediction of the relevance (click-through rates) of ads. We study mechanisms that optimize for a convex combination of efficiency and…

In e-commerce, ranking the search results based on users' preference is the most important task. Commercial e-commerce platforms, such as, Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, Walmart, etc. perform extensive and relentless research to perfect their…

Recommending a sequence of activities for an ongoing case requires that the recommendations conform to the underlying business process and meet the performance goal of either completion time or process outcome. Existing work on next…

Sequential recommendation, where user preference is dynamically inferred from sequential historical behaviors, is a critical task in recommender systems (RSs). To further optimize long-term user engagement, offline…

Given an input query, a recommendation model is trained using user feedback data (e.g., click data) to output a ranked list of items. In real-world systems, besides accuracy, an important consideration for a new model is novelty of its…

There are great interests as well as many challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to recommendation systems. In this setting, an online user is the environment; neither the reward function nor the environment dynamics are clearly…

Frequency control is an important problem in modern recommender systems. It dictates the delivery frequency of recommendations to maintain product quality and efficiency. For example, the frequency of delivering promotional notifications…

Business success in e-commerce depends on customer perceived value. A customer with high perceived value buys, returns, and recommends items. The perceived value is at risk whenever the information load harms users' shopping experience. In…

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…

Recommender systems are a vital tool that helps us to overcome the information overload problem. They are being used by most e-commerce web sites and attract the interest of a broad scientific community. A recommender system uses data on…