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We present a novel recommender systems dataset that records the sequential interactions between users and an online marketplace. The users are sequentially presented with both recommendations and search results in the form of ranked lists…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Simen Eide , Arnoldo Frigessi , Helge Jenssen , David S. Leslie , Joakim Rishaug , Sofie Verrewaere

In recommender systems, reinforcement learning solutions have shown promising results in optimizing the interaction sequence between users and the system over the long-term performance. For practical reasons, the policy's actions are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Xiaobei Wang , Shuchang Liu , Xueliang Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Lantao Hu , Han Li , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Guangming Xie

Unlike traditional recommendation tasks, finite user time budgets introduce a critical resource constraint, requiring the recommender system to balance item relevance and evaluation cost. For example, in a mobile shopping interface, users…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Sayak Chakrabarty , Souradip Pal

The slate re-ranking problem considers the mutual influences between items to improve user satisfaction in e-commerce, compared with the point-wise ranking. Previous works either directly rank items by an end to end model, or rank items by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Jianxiong Wei , Anxiang Zeng , Yueqiu Wu , Peng Guo , Qingsong Hua , Qingpeng Cai

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Talha Bozkus , Urbashi Mitra

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

LLM-based agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for simulating user behavior to enhance recommender systems. However, their effectiveness is often limited by existing studies that focus on modeling user ratings for individual items.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Jiahao Wang , Bokang Fu , Yu Zhu , Yuli Liu

Model-based reinforcement learning uses models to plan, where the predictions and policies of an agent can be improved by using more computation without additional data from the environment, thereby improving sample efficiency. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Animesh Kumar Paul , Videh Raj Nema

Reinforcement learning methods have been used to optimize long-term user engagement in recommendation systems. However, existing reinforcement learning-based recommendation systems do not fully exploit the relevance of individual user…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Yongxin Deng , Xihe Qiu , Xiaoyu Tan , Yaochu Jin

In this paper we consider the problem of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy for a discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP). Given an MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, the discount factor $\gamma \in (0,1)$, and an approximation threshold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Zihan Zhang , Yuan Zhou , Xiangyang Ji

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

We introduce a model-free algorithm for learning in Markov decision processes with parameterized actions-discrete actions with continuous parameters. At each step the agent must select both which action to use and which parameters to use…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-30 Warwick Masson , Pravesh Ranchod , George Konidaris

In this paper, a review of model-free reinforcement learning for learning of dynamical systems in uncertain environments has discussed. For this purpose, the Markov Decision Process (MDP) will be reviewed. Furthermore, some learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Mehran Attar , Mohammadreza Dabirian

Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However, the sample complexity of model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-03 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Ilya Sutskever , Sergey Levine

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) often faces an enormous state-action space. Existing analytical results are typically for settings with a small number of state-actions, or simple models such as linearly modeled Q-functions. To derive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Sing-Yuan Yeh , Fu-Chieh Chang , Chang-Wei Yueh , Pei-Yuan Wu , Alberto Bernacchia , Sattar Vakili

Most recommender systems recommend a list of items. The user examines the list, from the first item to the last, and often chooses the first attractive item and does not examine the rest. This type of user behavior can be modeled by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-01 Shi Zong , Hao Ni , Kenny Sung , Nan Rosemary Ke , Zheng Wen , Branislav Kveton

Knowledge Representation is important issue in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we bridge the gap between reinforcement learning and knowledge representation, by providing a rich knowledge representation framework, based on normal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2010-12-08 Emad Saad

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) generally suffers from poor sample complexity, mostly due to the need to exhaustively explore the state-action space to find well-performing policies. On the other hand, we postulate that expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Loris Di Natale , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Philipp Heer , Colin N. Jones

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular learning paradigm due to its potential sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, existing empirical model-based RL approaches lack the ability to explore. This work studies a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Yuda Song , Wen Sun

A transparent decision-making process is essential for developing reliable and trustworthy recommender systems. For sequential recommendation, it means that the model can identify key items that account for its recommendation results.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Kun Ma , Cong Xu , Zeyuan Chen , Wei Zhang