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Crowdsourcing systems aggregate decisions of many people to help users quickly identify high-quality options, such as the best answers to questions or interesting news stories. A long-standing issue in crowdsourcing is how option quality…
In this paper, we study collaborative filtering in an interactive setting, in which the recommender agents iterate between making recommendations and updating the user profile based on the interactive feedback. The most challenging problem…
We study a model of user decision-making in the context of recommender systems via numerical simulation. Our model provides an explanation for the findings of Nguyen, et. al (2014), where, in environments where recommender systems are…
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…
Recommender systems play a fundamental role in web applications in filtering massive information and matching user interests. While many efforts have been devoted to developing more effective models in various scenarios, the exploration on…
Collaborative filtering (CF) is a popular technique in today's recommender systems, and matrix approximation-based CF methods have achieved great success in both rating prediction and top-N recommendation tasks. However, real-world…
One of the main challenges in recommender systems is data sparsity which leads to high variance. Several attempts have been made to improve the bias-variance trade-off using auxiliary information. In particular, document modeling-based…
As recommendation systems become increasingly standard for online platforms, simulations provide an avenue for understanding the impacts of these systems on individuals and society. When constructing a recommendation system simulation,…
There is much empirical evidence that item-item collaborative filtering works well in practice. Motivated to understand this, we provide a framework to design and analyze various recommendation algorithms. The setup amounts to online binary…
When an algorithm provides risk assessments, we typically think of them as helpful inputs to human decisions, such as when risk scores are presented to judges or doctors. However, a decision-maker may react not only to the information…
Many recommendation algorithms rely on user data to generate recommendations. However, these recommendations also affect the data obtained from future users. This work aims to understand the effects of this dynamic interaction. We propose a…
Imitation learning practitioners have often noted that conditioning policies on previous actions leads to a dramatic divergence between "held out" error and performance of the learner in situ. Interactive approaches can provably address…
Collaborative recommendation is an information-filtering technique that attempts to present information items (movies, music, books, news, images, Web pages, etc.) that are likely of interest to the Internet user. Traditionally,…
Recommender systems often rely on models which are trained to maximize accuracy in predicting user preferences. When the systems are deployed, these models determine the availability of content and information to different users. The gap…
Accurate prediction of users' responses to items is one of the main aims of many computational advising applications. Examples include recommending movies, news articles, songs, jobs, clothes, books and so forth. Accurate prediction of…
Selection bias is prevalent in the data for training and evaluating recommendation systems with explicit feedback. For example, users tend to rate items they like. However, when rating an item concerning a specific user, most of the…
Collaborative filtering analyzes user preferences for items (e.g., books, movies, restaurants, academic papers) by exploiting the similarity patterns across users. In implicit feedback settings, all the items, including the ones that a user…
A central role in shaping the experience of users online is played by recommendation algorithms. On the one hand they help retrieving content that best suits users taste, but on the other hand they may give rise to the so called "filter…
The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information. Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of communities…
Recommender Systems have proliferated as general-purpose approaches to model a wide variety of consumer interaction data. Specific instances make use of signals ranging from user feedback, item relationships, geographic locality, social…