Related papers: UOEP: User-Oriented Exploration Policy for Enhanci…

Recommending novel content, which expands user horizons by introducing them to new interests, has been shown to improve users' long-term experience on recommendation platforms \cite{chen2021values}. Users however are not constantly looking…

How might we design Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based recommenders that encourage aligning user trajectories with the underlying user satisfaction? Three research questions are key: (1) measuring user satisfaction, (2) combatting sparsity…

As the last pivotal stage of Recommender System (RS), Multi-Task Fusion (MTF) is responsible for combining multiple scores outputted by Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model into a final score to maximize user satisfaction. Recently, to optimize…

Fairness-aware recommender systems often mitigate bias by increasing exposure to under-represented or long-tail content, commonly through mechanisms that promote novelty and diversity. In practice, the strength of such interventions is…

In this paper, a unified framework for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed based on an option-critic model. The proposed framework learns to integrate a set of diverse exploration strategies so that the agent can…

In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…

Recent advancements in Recommender Systems (RS) have incorporated Reinforcement Learning (RL), framing the recommendation as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, offline RL policies trained on static user data are vulnerable to…

Algorithmic Recourse aims to provide actionable explanations, or recourse plans, to overturn potentially unfavourable decisions taken by automated machine learning models. In this paper, we propose an interaction paradigm based on a guided…

Recommender systems have been widely applied in different real-life scenarios to help us find useful information. In particular, Reinforcement Learning (RL) based recommender systems have become an emerging research topic in recent years,…

Experience replay enables reinforcement learning agents to memorize and reuse past experiences, just as humans replay memories for the situation at hand. Contemporary off-policy algorithms either replay past experiences uniformly or utilize…

Exploration is essential to improve long-term recommendation quality, but it often degrades short-term business performance, especially in remote-first TV environments where users engage passively, expect instant relevance, and offer few…

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Traditional recommender systems based on revealed preferences often fail to capture the fundamental duality in user behavior, where consumption choices are driven by both inherent value (enrichment) and instant appeal (temptation).…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced in reasoning when optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) under verifiable rewards. Existing methods primarily rely on outcome-based supervision to strengthen internal LLM reasoning,…

Autonomous 3D environment exploration is a fundamental task for various applications such as navigation. The goal of exploration is to investigate a new environment and build its occupancy map efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Exploration, the act of broadening user experiences beyond their established preferences, is challenging in large-scale recommendation systems due to feedback loops and limited signals on user exploration patterns. Large Language Models…

Recommender systems must balance personalization, diversity, and robustness to cold-start scenarios to remain effective in dynamic content environments. This paper introduces an adaptive, exploration-based recommendation framework that…

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated great potential in robotic control, where effective exploration is crucial for efficient and high-quality policy learning. However, how to encourage the agent to explore the…