Related papers: Offline Evaluation of Reward-Optimizing Recommende…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows for the training of competent agents from offline datasets without any interaction with the environment. Online finetuning of such offline models can further improve performance. But how should we…
Sequential decision-making agents struggle with long horizon tasks, since solving them requires multi-step reasoning. Most reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms address this challenge by improved credit assignment, introducing memory…
Reciprocal recommender systems~(RRS), conducting bilateral recommendations between two involved parties, have gained increasing attention for enhancing matching efficiency. However, the majority of existing methods in the literature still…
Generative models such as diffusion have been employed as world models in offline reinforcement learning to generate synthetic data for more effective learning. Existing work either generates diffusion models one-time prior to training or…
The world currently offers an abundance of data in multiple domains, from which we can learn reinforcement learning (RL) policies without further interaction with the environment. RL agents learning offline from such data is possible but…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…
We study offline recommender learning from explicit rating feedback in the presence of selection bias. A current promising solution for the bias is the inverse propensity score (IPS) estimation. However, the performance of existing…
Online controlled experiments, colloquially known as A/B-tests, are the bread and butter of real-world recommender system evaluation. Typically, end-users are randomly assigned some system variant, and a plethora of metrics are then…
Assessing the validity of user simulators when used for the evaluation of information retrieval systems remains an open question, constraining their effective use and the reliability of simulation-based results. To address this issue, we…
In contrast to offline working fashions, two research paradigms are devised for online learning: (1) Online Meta Learning (OML) learns good priors over model parameters (or learning to learn) in a sequential setting where tasks are revealed…
Conversational recommender systems aim to interactively support online users in their information search and decision-making processes in an intuitive way. With the latest advances in voice-controlled devices, natural language processing,…
Our team is proposing to run a full-scale energy demand response experiment in an office building. Although this is an exciting endeavor which will provide value to the community, collecting training data for the reinforcement learning…
Offline reinforcement learning allows training reinforcement learning models on data from live deployments. However, it is limited to choosing the best combination of behaviors present in the training data. In contrast, simulation…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is important for closing the gap between offline training and evaluation of reinforcement learning (RL), by estimating performance and/or rank of target (evaluation) policies using offline trajectories only. It…
Online experiments in internet systems, also known as A/B tests, are used for a wide range of system tuning problems, such as optimizing recommender system ranking policies and learning adaptive streaming controllers. Decision-makers…
We consider the problem of sequential recommendation, where the current recommendation is made based on past interactions. This recommendation task requires efficient processing of the sequential data and aims to provide recommendations…
Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a practical paradigm that leverages offline datasets for pretraining and online interactions for fine-tuning. However, its empirical behavior is highly inconsistent: design…
In reinforcement learning (RL), there are two major settings for interacting with the environment: online and offline. Online methods explore the environment at significant time cost, and offline methods efficiently obtain reward signals by…
Current evaluations of Continual Learning (CL) methods typically assume that there is no constraint on training time and computation. This is an unrealistic assumption for any real-world setting, which motivates us to propose: a practical…
In many practical applications, usually, similar optimisation problems or scenarios repeatedly appear. Learning from previous problem-solving experiences can help adjust algorithm components of meta-heuristics, e.g., adaptively selecting…