Related papers: Incentivized Exploration with Stochastic Covariate…
Two-stage recommender systems are widely adopted in industry due to their scalability and maintainability. These systems produce recommendations in two steps: (i) multiple nominators preselect a small number of items from a large pool using…
We present a new recommendation setting for picking out two items from a given set to be highlighted to a user, based on contextual input. These two items are presented to a user who chooses one of them, possibly stochastically, with a bias…
Recommender systems trained in a continuous learning fashion are plagued by the feedback loop problem, also known as algorithmic bias. This causes a newly trained model to act greedily and favor items that have already been engaged by…
We develop a probabilistic framework for analysing model-based reinforcement learning in the episodic setting. We then apply it to study finite-time horizon stochastic control problems with linear dynamics but unknown coefficients and…
We consider an online two-stage stochastic optimization with long-term constraints over a finite horizon of $T$ periods. At each period, we take the first-stage action, observe a model parameter realization and then take the second-stage…
We propose and design recommendation systems that incentivize efficient exploration. Agents arrive sequentially, choose actions and receive rewards, drawn from fixed but unknown action-specific distributions. The recommendation system…
We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…
We consider an agent who is involved in a Markov decision process and receives a vector of outcomes every round. Her objective is to maximize a global concave reward function on the average vectorial outcome. The problem models applications…
Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which learns a reward model from human preference data and then optimizes a policy to favor preferred responses, has emerged as a central paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs)…
We initiate the study of multi-stage episodic reinforcement learning under adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system extending recent results for the special case of stochastic…
We consider an online two-stage stochastic optimization with long-term constraints over a finite horizon of $T$ periods. At each period, we take the first-stage action, observe a model parameter realization and then take the second-stage…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…
We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…
In digital health and EdTech, recommendation systems face a significant challenge: users often choose impulsively, in ways that conflict with the platform's long-term payoffs. This misalignment makes it difficult to effectively learn to…
We study the effect of persistence of engagement on learning in a stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. In advertising and recommendation systems, repetition effect includes a wear-in period, where the user's propensity to reward the…
Exposure bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where items and suppliers are not equally represented in the recommendation results. This bias becomes particularly problematic over time as a few items are repeatedly…
In this paper, we study collaborative filtering in an interactive setting, in which the recommender agents iterate between making recommendations and updating the user profile based on the interactive feedback. The most challenging problem…
All learning algorithms for recommendations face inevitable and critical trade-off between exploiting partial knowledge of a user's preferences for short-term satisfaction and exploring additional user preferences for long-term coverage.…
In the incentivized exploration model, a principal aims to explore and learn over time by interacting with a sequence of self-interested agents. It has been recently understood that the main challenge in designing incentive-compatible…