Related papers: Towards Resolving Propensity Contradiction in Offl…
Recommender systems operate in closed feedback loops, where user interactions reinforce popularity bias, leading to over-recommendation of already popular items while under-exposing niche or novel content. Existing bias mitigation methods,…
Implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times, etc.) is an abundant source of data in human-interactive systems. While implicit feedback has many advantages (e.g., it is inexpensive to collect, user centric, and timely), its inherent biases…
Recent advances in unbiased learning to rank (LTR) count on Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) to eliminate bias in implicit feedback. Though theoretically sound in correcting the bias introduced by treating clicked documents as relevant, IPS…
When learning from a batch of logged bandit feedback, the discrepancy between the policy to be learned and the off-policy training data imposes statistical and computational challenges. Unlike classical supervised learning and online…
The evaluation of recommendation systems is a complex task. The offline and online evaluation metrics for recommender systems are ambiguous in their true objectives. The majority of recently published papers benchmark their methods using…
Recommender Systems (RS) often suffer from popularity bias, where a small set of popular items dominate the recommendation results due to their high interaction rates, leaving many less popular items overlooked. This phenomenon…
Ratings of a user to most items in recommender systems are usually missing not at random (MNAR), largely because users are free to choose which items to rate. To achieve unbiased learning of the prediction model under MNAR data, three…
Learning effective contextual-bandit policies from past actions of a deployed system is highly desirable in many settings (e.g. voice assistants, recommendation, search), since it enables the reuse of large amounts of log data.…
The general aim of the recommender system is to provide personalized suggestions to users, which is opposed to suggesting popular items. However, the normal training paradigm, i.e., fitting a recommender model to recover the user behavior…
Implicit feedback has been widely used to build commercial recommender systems. Because observed feedback represents users' click logs, there is a semantic gap between true relevance and observed feedback. More importantly, observed…
Recommender and search systems commonly rely on Learning To Rank models trained on logged user interactions to order items by predicted relevance. However, such interaction data is often subject to position bias, as users are more likely to…
This paper studies the problem of learning interactive recommender systems from logged feedbacks without any exploration in online environments. We address the problem by proposing a general offline reinforcement learning framework for…
The goal of unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) is to leverage implicit user feedback for optimizing learning-to-rank systems. Among existing solutions, automatic ULTR algorithms that jointly learn user bias models (i.e., propensity models)…
Missing data is frequently encountered in many areas of statistics. Propensity score weighting is a popular method for handling missing data. The propensity score method employs a response propensity model, but correct specification of the…
Recommender systems widely use implicit feedback such as click data because of its general availability. Although the presence of clicks signals the users' preference to some extent, the lack of such clicks does not necessarily indicate a…
Anecdotally, using an estimated propensity score is superior to the true propensity score in estimating the average treatment effect based on observational data. However, this claim comes with several qualifications: it holds only if…
We propose a new online learning model for learning with preference feedback. The model is especially suited for applications like web search and recommender systems, where preference data is readily available from implicit user feedback…
We consider the problem of online multiclass classification with partial feedback, where an algorithm predicts a class for a new instance in each round and only receives its correctness. Although several methods have been developed for this…
Negative sampling methods are vital in implicit recommendation models as they allow us to obtain negative instances from massive unlabeled data. Most existing approaches focus on sampling hard negative samples in various ways. These studies…
Post-click conversion rate (CVR) is a reliable indicator of online customers' preferences, making it crucial for developing recommender systems. A major challenge in predicting CVR is severe selection bias, arising from users' inherent…