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Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong potential in generating 'believable human-like' behavior in web environments. Prior work has explored augmenting training data with LLM-synthesized rationales and applying…

Recommender systems (RSs) have become an inseparable part of our everyday lives. They help us find our favorite items to purchase, our friends on social networks, and our favorite movies to watch. Traditionally, the recommendation problem…

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Interactive recommender systems can dynamically adapt to user feedback, but often suffer from content homogeneity and filter bubble effects due to overfitting short-term user preferences. While recent efforts aim to improve content…

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,…

This study deeply explores the application of large language model (LLM) in personalized recommendation system of e-commerce. Aiming at the limitations of traditional recommendation algorithms in processing large-scale and multi-dimensional…

While Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) reasoning has shown promise in Large Language Models (LLMs), its adoption for enhancing recommendation quality is growing rapidly. In this work, we critically examine this trend and argue that Long CoT…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in document re-ranking, a key component in modern Information Retrieval (IR) systems. However, existing LLM-based approaches face notable limitations, including ranking…

Recent studies increasingly explore Large Language Models (LLMs) as a new paradigm for recommendation systems due to their scalability and world knowledge. However, existing work has three key limitations: (1) most efforts focus on…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

High relevance of retrieved and re-ranked items to the search query is the cornerstone of successful product search, yet measuring relevance of items to queries is one of the most challenging tasks in product information retrieval, and…

In this paper, we introduce Rank-R1, a novel LLM-based reranker that performs reasoning over both the user query and candidate documents before performing the ranking task. Existing document reranking methods based on large language models…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

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…

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

We introduce Shielded RecRL, a reinforcement learning approach to generate personalized explanations for recommender systems without sacrificing the system's original ranking performance. Unlike prior RLHF-based recommender methods that…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for data science decision-making but suffers from sample inefficiency, particularly in real-world scenarios with costly physical interactions. This paper introduces a novel human-inspired framework to…

It has long been recognized that it is not enough for a Recommender System (RS) to provide recommendations based only on their relevance to users. Among many other criteria, the set of recommendations may need to be diverse. Diversity is…

In online advertising, recommender systems try to propose items from a list of products to potential customers according to their interests. Such systems have been increasingly deployed in E-commerce due to the rapid growth of information…