Related papers: Improving Long-Term Metrics in Recommendation Syst…
We apply recurrent neural networks (RNN) on a new domain, namely recommender systems. Real-life recommender systems often face the problem of having to base recommendations only on short session-based data (e.g. a small sportsware website)…
Current advances in recommender systems have been remarkably successful in optimizing immediate engagement. However, long-term user engagement, a more desirable performance metric, remains difficult to improve. Meanwhile, recent…
Existing web-scale recommendation systems commonly use supervised learning methods that prioritize immediate user feedback. Although reinforcement learning (RL) offers a solution to optimize longer-term goals, such as in-session engagement,…
Optimizing user engagement is a key goal for modern recommendation systems, but blindly pushing users towards increased consumption risks burn-out, churn, or even addictive habits. To promote digital well-being, most platforms now offer a…
Modern recommender systems aim to improve user experience. As reinforcement learning (RL) naturally fits this objective -- maximizing an user's reward per session -- it has become an emerging topic in recommender systems. Developing…
Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) algorithms tackle sequential decision problems where agents may have different preferences over (possibly conflicting) reward functions. Such algorithms often learn a set of policies (each…
Complex, long-horizon planning and its combinatorial nature pose steep challenges for learning-based agents. Difficulties in such settings are exacerbated in low data regimes where over-fitting stifles generalization and compounding errors…
We study finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation for both policy evaluation and policy optimization. Prior work established that statistically efficient learning is impossible for either of these…
Boosting sales of e-commerce services is guaranteed once users find more matching items to their interests in a short time. Consequently, recommendation systems have become a crucial part of any successful e-commerce services. Although…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn complex policies to optimize agent operation over time. RL algorithms have shown promising results in solving complicated problems in recent years. However, their application on…
Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is an important task in location-based social networks. It facilitates the relation modeling between users and locations. Recently, researchers recommend POIs by long- and short-term interests and…
Recommending novel content, which expands user horizons by introducing them to new interests, has been shown to improve users' long-term experience on recommendation platforms \cite{chen2021values}. Users however are not constantly looking…
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) explicitly solicit users' preferences for improved recommendations on the fly. Most existing CRS solutions count on a single policy trained by reinforcement learning for a population of users.…
Safe policy improvement (SPI) is an offline reinforcement learning problem in which a new policy that reliably outperforms the behavior policy with high confidence needs to be computed using only a dataset and the behavior policy. Markov…
Horizon reduction is a common design strategy in offline reinforcement learning (RL), used to mitigate long-horizon credit assignment, improve stability, and enable scalable learning through truncated rollouts, windowed training, or…
We study how to effectively leverage expert feedback to learn sequential decision-making policies. We focus on problems with sparse rewards and long time horizons, which typically pose significant challenges in reinforcement learning. We…
With the recent advancements of technology in facilitating real-time monitoring and data collection, "just-in-time" interventions can be delivered via mobile devices to achieve both real-time and long-term management and control.…
Recommender selects and presents top-K items to the user at each online request, and a recommendation session consists of several sequential requests. Formulating a recommendation session as a Markov decision process and solving it by…
Policy iteration (PI) is a recursive process of policy evaluation and improvement for solving an optimal decision-making/control problem, or in other words, a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. PI has also served as the fundamental for…
An effective online recommendation system should jointly capture users' long-term and short-term preferences in both users' internal behaviors (from the target recommendation task) and external behaviors (from other tasks). However, it is…