Related papers: Minimizing Live Experiments in Recommender Systems…
Online experiments (A/B tests) are widely regarded as the gold standard for evaluating recommender system variants and guiding launch decisions. However, a variety of biases can distort the results of the experiment and mislead…
In this position paper, we discuss recent applications of simulation approaches for recommender systems tasks. In particular, we describe how they were used to analyze the problem of misinformation spreading and understand which data…
Voting rules based on evaluation inputs rather than preference orders have been recently proposed, like majority judgement, range voting or approval voting. Traditionally, probabilistic analysis of voting rules supposes the use of…
An increasing reliance on recommender systems has led to concerns about the creation of filter bubbles on social media, especially on short video platforms like TikTok. However, their formation is still not entirely understood due to the…
Given the exponential advancement in AI technologies and the potential escalation of harmful effects from recommendation systems, it is crucial to simulate and evaluate these effects early on. Doing so can help prevent possible damage to…
Personalized recommendation algorithms, like those on YouTube, significantly shape online content consumption. These systems aim to maximize engagement by learning users' preferences and aligning content accordingly but may unintentionally…
The content that a recommender system (RS) shows to users influences them. Therefore, when choosing a recommender to deploy, one is implicitly also choosing to induce specific internal states in users. Even more, systems trained via…
Recommender systems have become an integral part of online platforms, providing personalized recommendations for purchases, content consumption, and interpersonal connections. These systems consist of two sides: the producer side comprises…
Personalized recommendations have become a common feature of modern online services, including most major e-commerce sites, media platforms and social networks. Today, due to their high practical relevance, research in the area of…
Recommendation algorithms are known to suffer from popularity bias; a few popular items are recommended frequently while the majority of other items are ignored. These recommendations are then consumed by the users, their reaction will be…
The construction of effective Recommender Systems (RS) is a complex process, mainly due to the nature of RSs which involves large scale software-systems and human interactions. Iterative development processes require deep understanding of a…
Recommender systems are information retrieval methods that predict user preferences to personalize services. These systems use the feedback and the ratings provided by users to model the behavior of users and to generate recommendations.…
Recommendation systems are pervasive in the digital economy. An important assumption in many deployed systems is that user consumption reflects user preferences in a static sense: users consume the content they like with no other…
Industrial recommender systems deal with extremely large action spaces -- many millions of items to recommend. Moreover, they need to serve billions of users, who are unique at any point in time, making a complex user state space. Luckily,…
Auction-based recommender systems are prevalent in online advertising platforms, but they are typically optimized to allocate recommendation slots based on immediate expected return metrics, neglecting the downstream effects of…
Academic research in the field of recommender systems mainly focuses on the problem of maximizing the users' utility by trying to identify the most relevant items for each user. However, such items are not necessarily the ones that maximize…
Recommender systems are present in many web applications to guide our choices. They increase sales and benefit sellers, but whether they benefit customers by providing relevant products is questionable. Here we introduce a model to examine…
Before A/B testing online a new version of a recommender system, it is usual to perform some offline evaluations on historical data. We focus on evaluation methods that compute an estimator of the potential uplift in revenue that could…
In this paper, we introduce new formal methods and provide empirical evidence to highlight a unique safety concern prevalent in reinforcement learning (RL)-based recommendation algorithms -- 'user tampering.' User tampering is a situation…
Online controlled experiments are the primary tool for measuring the causal impact of product changes in digital businesses. It is increasingly common for digital products and services to interact with customers in a personalised way. Using…