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Most recommender systems optimize the model on observed interaction data, which is affected by the previous exposure mechanism and exhibits many biases like popularity bias. The loss functions, such as the mostly used pointwise Binary…

Ranked search results have become the main mechanism by which we find content, products, places, and people online. Thus their ordering contributes not only to the satisfaction of the searcher, but also to career and business opportunities,…

Unobserved confounding is a fundamental challenge for estimating causal effects. To address unobserved confounding, recent literature has turned to two different approaches -- proxy variables and the use of multiple treatments. The first…

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…

News recommender systems are hindered by the brief lifespan of articles, as they undergo rapid relevance decay. Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of content-based neural techniques in tackling this problem. However, these…

Recommendation fairness has recently attracted much attention. In the real world, recommendation systems are driven by user behavior, and since users with the same sensitive feature (e.g., gender and age) tend to have the same patterns,…

Recommendation systems (RS) aim to provide personalized content, but they face a challenge in unbiased learning due to selection bias, where users only interact with items they prefer. This bias leads to a distorted representation of user…

Deep neural networks do not discriminate between spurious and causal patterns, and will only learn the most predictive ones while ignoring the others. This shortcut learning behaviour is detrimental to a network's ability to generalize to…

Recommender systems often rely on observational user--item interaction data, which is prone to selection bias due to users' selective interactions with items. Inverse propensity weighting and doubly robust estimators effectively mitigate…

In web search and recommendation systems, user clicks are widely used to train ranking models. However, click data is heavily biased, i.e., users tend to click higher-ranked items (position bias), choose only what was shown to them…

While recent years have witnessed a rapid growth of research papers on recommender system (RS), most of the papers focus on inventing machine learning models to better fit user behavior data. However, user behavior data is observational…

Observed events in recommendation are consequence of the decisions made by a policy, thus they are usually selectively labeled, namely the data are Missing Not At Random (MNAR), which often causes large bias to the estimate of true outcomes…

We congratulate Nabi et al. (2022) on their impressive and insightful paper, which illustrates the benefits of using causal/counterfactual perspectives and tools in missing data problems. This paper represents an important approach to…

In causal matching designs, some control subjects are often left unmatched, and some covariates are often left unmodeled. This article introduces "rebar," a method using high-dimensional modeling to incorporate these commonly discarded data…

In recent years, dual-target Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been proposed to capture comprehensive user preferences in order to ultimately enhance the recommendation accuracy in both data-richer and data-sparser domains…

Counterfactual learning for dealing with missing-not-at-random data (MNAR) is an intriguing topic in the recommendation literature since MNAR data are ubiquitous in modern recommender systems. Missing-at-random (MAR) data, namely randomized…

Convenient access to observational data enables us to learn causal effects without randomized experiments. This research direction draws increasing attention in research areas such as economics, healthcare, and education. For example, we…

Recent work in recommender systems has emphasized the importance of fairness, with a particular interest in bias and transparency, in addition to predictive accuracy. In this paper, we focus on the state of the art pairwise ranking model,…

Distinguishing cause and effect from bivariate observational data is a foundational problem in many disciplines, but challenging without additional assumptions. Additive noise models (ANMs) are widely used to enable sample-efficient…

Inferring user preferences from the historical feedback of users is a valuable problem in recommender systems. Conventional approaches often rely on the assumption that user preferences in the feedback data are equivalent to the real user…