1,311 research outputs found
Whole-Chain Recommendations
With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been
tremendous interests in developing RL-based recommender systems. In practical
recommendation sessions, users will sequentially access multiple scenarios,
such as the entrance pages and the item detail pages, and each scenario has its
specific characteristics. However, the majority of existing RL-based
recommender systems focus on optimizing one strategy for all scenarios or
separately optimizing each strategy, which could lead to sub-optimal overall
performance. In this paper, we study the recommendation problem with multiple
(consecutive) scenarios, i.e., whole-chain recommendations. We propose a
multi-agent RL-based approach (DeepChain), which can capture the sequential
correlation among different scenarios and jointly optimize multiple
recommendation strategies. To be specific, all recommender agents (RAs) share
the same memory of users' historical behaviors, and they work collaboratively
to maximize the overall reward of a session. Note that optimizing multiple
recommendation strategies jointly faces two challenges in the existing
model-free RL model - (i) it requires huge amounts of user behavior data, and
(ii) the distribution of reward (users' feedback) are extremely unbalanced. In
this paper, we introduce model-based RL techniques to reduce the training data
requirement and execute more accurate strategy updates. The experimental
results based on a real e-commerce platform demonstrate the effectiveness of
the proposed framework.Comment: 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge
Managemen
Learning Tree-based Deep Model for Recommender Systems
Model-based methods for recommender systems have been studied extensively in
recent years. In systems with large corpus, however, the calculation cost for
the learnt model to predict all user-item preferences is tremendous, which
makes full corpus retrieval extremely difficult. To overcome the calculation
barriers, models such as matrix factorization resort to inner product form
(i.e., model user-item preference as the inner product of user, item latent
factors) and indexes to facilitate efficient approximate k-nearest neighbor
searches. However, it still remains challenging to incorporate more expressive
interaction forms between user and item features, e.g., interactions through
deep neural networks, because of the calculation cost.
In this paper, we focus on the problem of introducing arbitrary advanced
models to recommender systems with large corpus. We propose a novel tree-based
method which can provide logarithmic complexity w.r.t. corpus size even with
more expressive models such as deep neural networks. Our main idea is to
predict user interests from coarse to fine by traversing tree nodes in a
top-down fashion and making decisions for each user-node pair. We also show
that the tree structure can be jointly learnt towards better compatibility with
users' interest distribution and hence facilitate both training and prediction.
Experimental evaluations with two large-scale real-world datasets show that the
proposed method significantly outperforms traditional methods. Online A/B test
results in Taobao display advertising platform also demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed method in production environments.Comment: Accepted by KDD 201
Maximizing User Engagement In Short Marketing Campaigns Within An Online Living Lab: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective
ABSTRACT
MAXIMIZING USER ENGAGEMENT IN SHORT MARKETING CAMPAIGNS WITHIN AN ONLINE LIVING LAB: A REINFORCEMENT LEARNING PERSPECTIVE
by
ANIEKAN MICHAEL INI-ABASI
August 2021
Advisor: Dr. Ratna Babu Chinnam Major: Industrial & Systems Engineering Degree: Doctor of Philosophy
User engagement has emerged as the engine driving online business growth. Many firms have pay incentives tied to engagement and growth metrics. These corporations are turning to recommender systems as the tool of choice in the business of maximizing engagement. LinkedIn reported a 40% higher email response with the introduction of a new recommender system. At Amazon 35% of sales originate from recommendations, while Netflix reports that ‘75% of what people watch is from some sort of recommendation,’ with an estimated business value of 42 for every dollar spent when compared to other marketing channels such as social media.
Coupled with the state space transformation, our novel regularized Deep Q-learning (DQN) agent was able to train and perform well based on a few observed users’ responses. First, we explored the average positive effect of using persuasion-based messages in a live email marketing campaign, without deploying a learning algorithm to recommend the influence principles. The selection of persuasion tactics was done heuristically, using only domain knowledge. Our results suggest that embedding certain principles of persuasion in campaign emails can significantly increase user engagement for an online business (and have a positive impact on revenues) without putting pressure on marketing or advertising budgets. During the study, the store had a customer retention rate of 76% and sales grew by a half-million dollars from the three field trials combined. The key assumption was that users are predisposed to respond to certain persuasion principles and learning the right principles to incorporate in the message header or body copy would lead to higher response and engagement.
With the hypothesis validated, we set forth to build a DQN agent to recommend candidate actions from a catalog of persuasion principles most likely to drive higher engagement in the next messaging cycle. A simulation and a real live campaign are implemented to verify the proposed methodology. The results demonstrate the agent’s superior performance compared to a human expert and a control baseline by a significant margin (~ up to 300%). As the quest for effective methods and tools to maximize user engagement intensifies, our methodology could help to boost user engagement for struggling SMBs without prohibitive increase in costs, by enabling the targeting of messages (with the right persuasion principle) to the right user
Optimizing Long-term Value for Auction-Based Recommender Systems via On-Policy Reinforcement Learning
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 recommendations on user behavior. In this study, we employ reinforcement
learning to optimize for long-term return metrics in an auction-based
recommender system. Utilizing temporal difference learning, a fundamental
reinforcement learning algorithm, we implement an one-step policy improvement
approach that biases the system towards recommendations with higher long-term
user engagement metrics. This optimizes value over long horizons while
maintaining compatibility with the auction framework. Our approach is grounded
in dynamic programming ideas which show that our method provably improves upon
the existing auction-based base policy. Through an online A/B test conducted on
an auction-based recommender system which handles billions of impressions and
users daily, we empirically establish that our proposed method outperforms the
current production system in terms of long-term user engagement metrics
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