Related papers: Reinforcement Learning to Optimize Long-term User …

We study session-based recommendation scenarios where we want to recommend items to users during sequential interactions to improve their long-term utility. Optimizing a long-term metric is challenging because the learning signal (whether…

Recent research has employed reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to optimize long-term user engagement in recommender systems, thereby avoiding common pitfalls such as user boredom and filter bubbles. They capture the sequential and…

Sequential recommendation tasks, which aim to predict the next item a user will interact with, typically rely on models trained solely on historical data. However, in real-world scenarios, user behavior can fluctuate in the long interaction…

As a key stage of Recommender Systems (RSs), Multi-Task Fusion (MTF) is responsible for merging multiple scores output by Multi-Task Learning (MTL) into a single score, finally determining the recommendation results. Recently, Reinforcement…

In this paper, we introduce new formal methods and provide empirical evidence to highlight a unique safety concern prevalent in reinforcement learning (RL)-based recommendation algorithms -- 'user tampering.' User tampering is a situation…

To support complex search tasks, where the initial information requirements are complex or may change during the search, a search engine must adapt the information delivery as the user's information requirements evolve. To support this…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular paradigm for addressing sequential decision tasks in which the agent has only limited environmental feedback. Despite many advances over the past three decades, learning in many domains still…

Precisely modeling user ultra-long sequences is critical for industrial recommender systems. Current approaches predominantly focus on leveraging ultra-long sequences in the ranking stage, whereas research for the candidate retrieval stage…

Movie recommendation systems provide users with ranked lists of movies based on individual's preferences and constraints. Two types of models are commonly used to generate ranking results: long-term models and session-based models. While…

Most recommender systems (RS) research assumes that a user's utility can be maximized independently of the utility of the other agents (e.g., other users, content providers). In realistic settings, this is often not true---the dynamics of…

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has gained popularity and has been applied to a wide range of tasks. One such popular domain where RL has been effective is resource management problems in systems. We look to extend work on RL…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning which is employed to solve various sequential decision making problems without proper supervision. Due to the recent advancement of deep learning, the newly proposed Deep-RL…

Recommender systems are often optimised for short-term reward: a recommendation is considered successful if a reward (e.g. a click) can be observed immediately after the recommendation. The advantage of this framework is that with some…

In this paper, we propose a theoretically founded sequential strategy for training large-scale Recommender Systems (RS) over implicit feedback, mainly in the form of clicks. The proposed approach consists in minimizing pairwise ranking loss…

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces substantial challenges when applied to real-life problems, primarily stemming from the scarcity of available data due to limited interactions with the environment. This limitation is exacerbated by the fact…

A central component of training in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is Experience: the data used for training. The mechanisms used to generate and consume this data have an important effect on the performance of RL algorithms. In this paper, we…

In this paper, we study the effect of long memory in the learnability of a sequential recommender system including users' implicit feedback. We propose an online algorithm, where model parameters are updated user per user over blocks of…

Recommendation models are predominantly trained using implicit user feedback, since explicit feedback is often costly to obtain. However, implicit feedback, such as clicks, does not always reflect users' real preferences. For example, a…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is widely used to study hidden or hard-to-reach populations by incentivizing study participants to recruit their social connections. The success and efficiency of RDS can depend critically on the nature of…