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Related papers: Local Policy Improvement for Recommender Systems

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Standard reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) trains a reward model on pairwise preference data and then uses it for policy optimization. However, while reward models are optimized to capture relative preferences, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Kyuseong Choi , Dwaipayan Saha , Woojeong Kim , Anish Agarwal , Raaz Dwivedi

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

This paper studies the problem of learning interactive recommender systems from logged feedbacks without any exploration in online environments. We address the problem by proposing a general offline reinforcement learning framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Teng Xiao , Donglin Wang

Policy optimization methods with function approximation are widely used in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, it remains elusive how to design such algorithms with statistical guarantees. Leveraging a multi-agent performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Yulai Zhao , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Jason D. Lee

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as an effective approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences. RLHF contains three steps, i.e., human preference collecting, reward learning, and policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Hao Lang , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

We present an algorithm for local, regularized, policy improvement in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to formulate model-based and model-free variants in a single framework. Our algorithm can be interpreted as a natural extension…

Based on the success of recommender systems in e-commerce, there is growing interest in their use in matching markets (e.g., labor). While this holds potential for improving market fluidity and fairness, we show in this paper that naively…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Yi Su , Magd Bayoumi , Thorsten Joachims

To design rewards that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing policies via reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seokhun Ju , Seungyub Han , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

We present a model-based offline reinforcement learning policy performance lower bound that explicitly captures dynamics model misspecification and distribution mismatch and we propose an empirical algorithm for optimal offline policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Kefan Dong , Yannis Flet-Berliac , Allen Nie , Emma Brunskill

Personalised interactive systems such as recommender systems require selecting relevant items from massive catalogs dependent on context. Reward-driven offline optimisation of these systems can be achieved by a relaxation of the discrete…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Otmane Sakhi , David Rohde , Alexandre Gilotte

Many prediction domains, such as ad placement, recommendation, trajectory prediction, and document summarization, require predicting a set or list of options. Such lists are often evaluated using submodular reward functions that measure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-14 Stephane Ross , Jiaji Zhou , Yisong Yue , Debadeepta Dey , J. Andrew Bagnell

Recommender systems are one of the most successful applications of machine learning and data science. They are successful in a wide variety of application domains, including e-commerce, media streaming content, email marketing, and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Juan Pablo Equihua , Maged Ali , Henrik Nordmark , Berthold Lausen

The dynamic environment in the real world calls for the adaptive techniques for information filtering, namely to provide real-time responses to the changes of system data. Where many incremental algorithms are designed for this purpose,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2009-11-26 Ci-Hang Jin , Jian-Guo Liu , Yi-Cheng Zhang , Tao Zhou

In this article, we will research the Recommender System's implementation about how it works and the algorithms used. We will explain the Recommender System's algorithms based on mathematical principles, and find feasible methods for…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Fu Chen , Junkang Zou , Lingfeng Zhou , Zekai Xu , Zhenyu Wu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan

Local Policy Search is a popular reinforcement learning approach for handling large state spaces. Formally, it searches locally in a paramet erized policy space in order to maximize the associated value function averaged over some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-06-07 Bruno Scherrer , Matthieu Geist

Modern recommendation systems rely on the wisdom of the crowd to learn the optimal course of action. This induces an inherent mis-alignment of incentives between the system's objective to learn (explore) and the individual users' objective…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Gal Bahar , Rann Smorodinsky , Moshe Tennenholtz

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-06 Xuqiao Li , Ying Yan