Related papers: Mitigating Hidden Confounding Effects for Causal R…

An important problem in causal inference is to break down the total effect of a treatment on an outcome into different causal pathways and to quantify the causal effect in each pathway. For instance, in causal fairness, the total effect of…

Confounding seriously impairs our ability to learn about causal relations from observational data. Confounding can be defined as a statistical association between two variables due to inputs from a common source (the confounder). For…

In offline reinforcement learning-based recommender systems (RLRS), learning effective state representations is crucial for capturing user preferences that directly impact long-term rewards. However, raw state representations often contain…

Recent years have witnessed the explosive growth of interaction behaviors in multimedia information systems, where multi-behavior recommender systems have received increasing attention by leveraging data from various auxiliary behaviors…

Discovering the causal effect of a decision is critical to nearly all forms of decision-making. In particular, it is a key quantity in drug development, in crafting government policy, and when implementing a real-world machine learning…

Recommender systems play a key role in shaping modern web ecosystems. These systems alternate between (1) making recommendations (2) collecting user responses to these recommendations, and (3) retraining the recommendation algorithm based…

In Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS), a user provides feedback on recommended items at each turn, leading the CRS towards improved recommendations. Due to the need for a large amount of data, a user simulator is employed for both…

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…

Recommender systems are quintessential applications of human-computer interaction. Widely utilized in daily life, they offer significant convenience but also present numerous challenges, such as the information cocoon effect, privacy…

Unfairness is a well-known challenge in Recommender Systems (RSs), often resulting in biased outcomes that disadvantage users or items based on attributes such as gender, race, age, or popularity. Although some approaches have started to…

Recommender systems have become crucial in information filtering nowadays. Existing recommender systems extract user preferences based on the correlation in data, such as behavioral correlation in collaborative filtering, feature-feature,…

Recommender Systems (RSs) are exploited by various business enterprises to suggest their products (items) to consumers (users). Collaborative filtering (CF) is a widely used variant of RSs which learns hidden patterns from user-item…

A combinatorial recommender (CR) system feeds a list of items to a user at a time in the result page, in which the user behavior is affected by both contextual information and items. The CR is formulated as a combinatorial optimization…

Learning effective latent representations for users and items is the cornerstone of recommender systems. Traditional approaches rely on user-item interaction data to map users and items into a shared latent space, but the sparsity of…

Enabling non-discrimination for end-users of recommender systems by introducing consumer fairness is a key problem, widely studied in both academia and industry. Current research has led to a variety of notions, metrics, and unfairness…

Traditional approaches for complementary product recommendations rely on behavioral and non-visual data such as customer co-views or co-buys. However, certain domains such as fashion are primarily visual. We propose a framework that…

Recommender systems recommend items more accurately by analyzing users' potential interest on different brands' items. In conjunction with users' rating similarity, the presence of users' implicit feedbacks like clicking items, viewing…

Conditioning on some set of confounders that causally affect both treatment and outcome variables can be sufficient for eliminating bias introduced by all such confounders when estimating causal effect of the treatment on the outcome from…

Causal effect estimation from observational data is one of the essential problems in causal inference. However, most estimation methods rely on the strong assumption that all confounders are observed, which is impractical and untestable in…

Inferring the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in an observational study requires adjusting for observed baseline confounders to avoid bias. However, adjusting for all observed baseline covariates, when only a subset are…