14,047 research outputs found
Optimism Based Exploration in Large-Scale Recommender Systems
Bandit learning algorithms have been an increasingly popular design choice
for recommender systems. Despite the strong interest in bandit learning from
the community, there remains multiple bottlenecks that prevent many bandit
learning approaches from productionalization. Two of the most important
bottlenecks are scaling to multi-task and A/B testing. Classic bandit
algorithms, especially those leveraging contextual information, often requires
reward for uncertainty estimation, which hinders their adoptions in multi-task
recommender systems. Moreover, different from supervised learning algorithms,
bandit learning algorithms emphasize greatly on the data collection process
through their explorative nature. Such explorative behavior induces unfair
evaluation for bandit learning agents in a classic A/B test setting. In this
work, we present a novel design of production bandit learning life-cycle for
recommender systems, along with a novel set of metrics to measure their
efficiency in user exploration. We show through large-scale production
recommender system experiments and in-depth analysis that our bandit agent
design improves personalization for the production recommender system and our
experiment design fairly evaluates the performance of bandit learning
algorithms
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
Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research
Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years,
thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which
nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip.
While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these
huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In
particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation
strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or
content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener
needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and
related publications quite sparse.
The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify
and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research
is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of
the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second,
we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further
evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving
the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and
providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet
under-researched, directions in the field
Transfer Meets Hybrid: A Synthetic Approach for Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering with Text
Collaborative filtering (CF) is the key technique for recommender systems
(RSs). CF exploits user-item behavior interactions (e.g., clicks) only and
hence suffers from the data sparsity issue. One research thread is to integrate
auxiliary information such as product reviews and news titles, leading to
hybrid filtering methods. Another thread is to transfer knowledge from other
source domains such as improving the movie recommendation with the knowledge
from the book domain, leading to transfer learning methods. In real-world life,
no single service can satisfy a user's all information needs. Thus it motivates
us to exploit both auxiliary and source information for RSs in this paper. We
propose a novel neural model to smoothly enable Transfer Meeting Hybrid (TMH)
methods for cross-domain recommendation with unstructured text in an end-to-end
manner. TMH attentively extracts useful content from unstructured text via a
memory module and selectively transfers knowledge from a source domain via a
transfer network. On two real-world datasets, TMH shows better performance in
terms of three ranking metrics by comparing with various baselines. We conduct
thorough analyses to understand how the text content and transferred knowledge
help the proposed model.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, a full version for the WWW 2019 short pape
Multi-modal Embedding Fusion-based Recommender
Recommendation systems have lately been popularized globally, with primary
use cases in online interaction systems, with significant focus on e-commerce
platforms. We have developed a machine learning-based recommendation platform,
which can be easily applied to almost any items and/or actions domain. Contrary
to existing recommendation systems, our platform supports multiple types of
interaction data with multiple modalities of metadata natively. This is
achieved through multi-modal fusion of various data representations. We
deployed the platform into multiple e-commerce stores of different kinds, e.g.
food and beverages, shoes, fashion items, telecom operators. Here, we present
our system, its flexibility and performance. We also show benchmark results on
open datasets, that significantly outperform state-of-the-art prior work.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure
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