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Reinforcement Learning (RL)-Based Recommender Systems (RSs) have gained rising attention for their potential to enhance long-term user engagement. However, research in this field faces challenges, including the lack of user-friendly…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Yuanqing Yu , Chongming Gao , Jiawei Chen , Heng Tang , Yuefeng Sun , Qian Chen , Weizhi Ma , Min Zhang

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) are widely used to model user behavior over time, yet their robustness remains an under-explored area of research. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to assess how the presence of fake users,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Filippo Betello

Recommendation systems have been essential for both user experience and platform efficiency by alleviating information overload and supporting decision-making. Traditional methods, i.e., content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Lining Chen , Qingwen Zeng , Huaming Chen

Sequential recommendation (SR) tasks aim to predict users' next interaction by learning their behavior sequence and capturing the connection between users' past interactions and their changing preferences. Conventional SR models often focus…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Haoyi Zhang , Guohao Sun , Jinhu Lu , Guanfeng Liu , Xiu Susie Fang

Long-term engagement is preferred over immediate engagement in sequential recommendation as it directly affects product operational metrics such as daily active users (DAUs) and dwell time. Meanwhile, reinforcement learning (RL) is widely…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Wanqi Xue , Qingpeng Cai , Ruohan Zhan , Dong Zheng , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Bo An

Recommender Systems are becoming ubiquitous in many settings and take many forms, from product recommendation in e-commerce stores, to query suggestions in search engines, to friend recommendation in social networks. Current research…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2018-09-17 David Rohde , Stephen Bonner , Travis Dunlop , Flavian Vasile , Alexandros Karatzoglou

In order to mitigate the sample complexity of real-world reinforcement learning, common practice is to first train a policy in a simulator where samples are cheap, and then deploy this policy in the real world, with the hope that it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Andrew Wagenmaker , Kevin Huang , Liyiming Ke , Byron Boots , Kevin Jamieson , Abhishek Gupta

Sequential recommendation systems often struggle to make predictions or take action when dealing with cold-start items that have limited amount of interactions. In this work, we propose SimRec - a new approach to mitigate the cold-start…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Shaked Brody , Shoval Lagziel

The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have generated considerable interest in their utilization for sequential recommendation tasks. While collaborative signals from similar users are central to recommendation modeling,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Tong Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate human-like capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and generation, driving interest in using LLM-based agents to simulate human feedback in recommender systems. However, most existing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Xinye Wanyan , Danula Hettiachchi , Chenglong Ma , Ziqi Xu , Jeffrey Chan

Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation to construct policies useful in real life is challenging. This is often attributed to the sequential decision making aspect: inaccuracies in simulation accumulate over multiple steps, hence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-09 Rika Antonova , Silvia Cruciani

User simulation is increasingly vital to develop and evaluate recommender systems (RSs). While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising avenues to simulate user behavior, they often struggle with the absence of specific task alignment…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Tianjun Wei , Huizhong Guo , Yingpeng Du , Zhu Sun , Huang Chen , Dongxia Wang , Jie Zhang

The integration of reinforcement learning (RL) into large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for recommender systems by eliciting reasoning and improving user preference modeling. However, RL-based LLM recommendation faces…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Lin Wang , Yang Zhang , Jingfan Chen , Xiaoyan Zhao , Fengbin Zhu , Qing Li , Tat-Seng Chua

Reinforcement learning (RL) recommender systems often rely on static datasets that fail to capture the fluid, ever changing nature of user preferences in real-world scenarios. Meanwhile, generative AI techniques have emerged as powerful…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Danial Ebrat , Eli Paradalis , Luis Rueda

The training paradigm integrating large language models (LLM) is gradually reshaping sequential recommender systems (SRS) and has shown promising results. However, most existing LLM-enhanced methods rely on rich textual information on the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Dugang Liu , Shenxian Xian , Xiaolin Lin , Xiaolian Zhang , Hong Zhu , Yuan Fang , Zhen Chen , Zhong Ming

Sequential recommender systems have become increasingly important in real-world applications that model user behavior sequences to predict their preferences. However, existing sequential recommendation methods predominantly rely on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Enze Liu , Bowen Zheng , Xiaolei Wang , Wayne Xin Zhao , Jinpeng Wang , Sheng Chen , Ji-Rong Wen

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

Simulation has emerged as a popular method to study the long-term societal consequences of recommender systems. This approach allows researchers to specify their theoretical model explicitly and observe the evolution of system-level…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Eli Lucherini , Matthew Sun , Amy Winecoff , Arvind Narayanan

Most recommender systems (RS) research assumes that a user's utility can be maximized independently of the utility of the other agents (e.g., other users, content providers). In realistic settings, this is often not true---the dynamics of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Martin Mladenov , Elliot Creager , Omer Ben-Porat , Kevin Swersky , Richard Zemel , Craig Boutilier

Training conversational recommender systems (CRS) requires extensive dialogue data, which is challenging to collect at scale. To address this, researchers have used simulated user-recommender conversations. Traditional simulation approaches…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Jerome Ramos , Feng Xia , Xi Wang , Shubham Chatterjee , Xiao Fu , Hossein A. Rahmani , Aldo Lipani