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Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial area of research in online advertising. While binary cross entropy (BCE) has been widely used as the optimization objective for treating CTR prediction as a binary classification problem,…
Online continual learning aims to get closer to a live learning experience by learning directly on a stream of data with temporally shifting distribution and by storing a minimum amount of data from that stream. In this empirical…
In this work, we argue for the importance of an online evaluation budget for a reliable comparison of deep offline RL algorithms. First, we delineate that the online evaluation budget is problem-dependent, where some problems allow for less…
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction tasks play a pivotal role in real-world applications, particularly in recommendation systems and online advertising. A significant research branch in this domain focuses on user behavior modeling. Current…
The goal in offline data-driven decision-making is synthesize decisions that optimize a black-box utility function, using a previously-collected static dataset, with no active interaction. These problems appear in many forms: offline…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) allows for the training of competent agents from offline datasets without any interaction with the environment. Online finetuning of such offline models can further improve performance. But how should we…
Offline Reinforcement learning is commonly used for sequential decision-making in domains such as healthcare and education, where the rewards are known and the transition dynamics $T$ must be estimated on the basis of batch data. A key…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is the method that attempts to estimate the performance of decision making policies using historical data generated by different policies without conducting costly online A/B tests. Accurate OPE is essential in…
Technology companies are increasingly using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as part of their development process. Despite having fine control over engineering systems and data instrumentation, these RCTs can still be imperfectly…
Ranking is a crucial module using in the recommender system. In particular, the ranking module using in our YoungTao recommendation scenario is to provide an ordered list of items to users, to maximize the click number throughout the…
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is an essential task in industrial applications such as video recommendation. Recently, deep learning models have been proposed to learn the representation of users' overall interests, while ignoring the…
Online alignment (e.g., GRPO) is generally more performant than offline alignment (e.g., DPO) -- but why? Drawing on prospect theory from behavioral economics, we propose a human-centric explanation. We prove that online on-policy sampling…
Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) aims to integrate the complementary strengths of offline and online RL by pre-training an agent offline and subsequently fine-tuning it through online interactions. However, recent studies…
Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) needs an environment to collect fresh data, which is impractical when online interactions are costly. Offline RL provides an alternative solution by directly learning from the previously collected…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize a policy using collected data without online interactions. Model-based approaches are particularly appealing for addressing offline RL challenges because of their capability to mitigate…
In Recommender System (RS), explanations help users understand why items are recommended and can enhance a system's transparency, persuasiveness, engagement, and trust, which are known as explanation goals. However, evaluating the…
In the online ride-hailing pricing context, companies often conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and utilize uplift models to assess the effect of discounts on customer orders, which substantially influences competitive market…
With the rapid growth of user historical behavior data, user interest modeling has become a prominent aspect in Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, focusing on learning user intent representations. However, this complexity poses…
Sequential decision problems are widely studied across many areas of science. A key challenge when learning policies from historical data - a practice commonly referred to as off-policy learning - is how to ``identify'' the impact of a…
A large-scale industrial recommendation platform typically consists of multiple associated scenarios, requiring a unified click-through rate (CTR) prediction model to serve them simultaneously. Existing approaches for multi-scenario CTR…