Related papers: Novelty and Primacy: A Long-Term Estimator for Onl…

The vast majority of recommender systems model preferences as static or slowly changing due to observable user experience. However, spontaneous changes in user preferences are ubiquitous in many domains like media consumption and key…

Effective exploration is believed to positively influence the long-term user experience on recommendation platforms. Determining its exact benefits, however, has been challenging. Regular A/B tests on exploration often measure neutral or…

Online controlled experimentation is widely adopted for evaluating new features in the rapid development cycle for web products and mobile applications. Measurement of the overall experiment sample is a common practice to quantify the…

Continual learning is the problem of learning and retaining knowledge through time over multiple tasks and environments. Research has primarily focused on the incremental classification setting, where new tasks/classes are added at discrete…

Novel scientific knowledge is constantly produced by the scientific community. Understanding the level of novelty characterized by scientific literature is key for modeling scientific dynamics and analyzing the growth mechanisms of…

Tech companies (e.g., Google or Facebook) often use randomized online experiments and/or A/B testing primarily based on the average treatment effects to compare their new product with an old one. However, it is also critically important to…

Learning user preferences for products based on their past purchases or reviews is at the cornerstone of modern recommendation engines. One complication in this learning task is that some users are more likely to purchase products or review…

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…

Online experiments in internet systems, also known as A/B tests, are used for a wide range of system tuning problems, such as optimizing recommender system ranking policies and learning adaptive streaming controllers. Decision-makers…

Experiments used in current continual learning research do not faithfully assess fundamental challenges of learning continually. Instead of assessing performance on challenging and representative experiment designs, recent research has…

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…

Offline evaluations of recommender systems attempt to estimate users' satisfaction with recommendations using static data from prior user interactions. These evaluations provide researchers and developers with first approximations of the…

Estimating the effects of long-term treatments through A/B testing is challenging. Treatments, such as updates to product functionalities, user interface designs, and recommendation algorithms, are intended to persist within the system for…

In streaming platforms churn is extremely costly, yet A/B tests are typically evaluated using outcomes observed within a limited experimental horizon. Even when both short- and predicted long-term engagement metrics are considered, they may…

Lifelong learning can be viewed as a continuous transfer learning procedure over consecutive tasks, where learning a given task depends on accumulated knowledge --- the so-called knowledge base. Most published work on lifelong learning…

The process of discovery in the physical, biological and medical sciences can be painstakingly slow. Most experiments fail, and the time from initiation of research until a new advance reaches commercial production can span 20 years. This…

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for ideation and scientific discovery, it is important to evaluate their ability to generate novel output. Prior work evaluates novelty as originality with respect to model training…

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Novelty, akin to gene mutation in evolution, opens possibilities for scholarly advancement. Although peer review remains the gold standard for evaluating novelty in scholarly communication and resource allocation, the vast volume of…

Randomized experiments (a.k.a. A/B tests) are a powerful tool for estimating treatment effects, to inform decisions making in business, healthcare and other applications. In many problems, the treatment has a lasting effect that evolves…