Controlling Fairness and Bias in Dynamic Learning-to-Rank

Rankings are the primary interface through which many online platforms match users to items (e.g. news, products, music, video). In these two-sided markets, not only the users draw utility from the rankings, but the rankings also determine the utility (e.g. exposure, revenue) for the item providers (e.g. publishers, sellers, artists, studios). It has already been noted that myopically optimizing utility to the users, as done by virtually all learning-to-rank algorithms, can be unfair to the item providers. We, therefore, present a learning-to-rank approach for explicitly enforcing merit-based fairness guarantees to groups of items (e.g. articles by the same publisher, tracks by the same artist). In particular, we propose a learning algorithm that ensures notions of amortized group fairness, while simultaneously learning the ranking function from implicit feedback data. The algorithm takes the form of a controller that integrates unbiased estimators for both fairness and utility, dynamically adapting both as more data becomes available. In addition to its rigorous theoretical foundation and convergence guarantees, we find empirically that the algorithm is highly practical and robust.Comment: First two authors contributed equally. In Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 202

Expressive recommender systems through normalized nonnegative models

We introduce normalized nonnegative models (NNM) for explorative data analysis. NNMs are partial convexifications of models from probability theory. We demonstrate their value at the example of item recommendation. We show that NNM-based recommender systems satisfy three criteria that all recommender systems should ideally satisfy: high predictive power, computational tractability, and expressive representations of users and items. Expressive user and item representations are important in practice to succinctly summarize the pool of customers and the pool of items. In NNMs, user representations are expressive because each user's preference can be regarded as normalized mixture of preferences of stereotypical users. The interpretability of item and user representations allow us to arrange properties of items (e.g., genres of movies or topics of documents) or users (e.g., personality traits) hierarchically

How Algorithmic Confounding in Recommendation Systems Increases Homogeneity and Decreases Utility

Recommendation systems are ubiquitous and impact many domains; they have the potential to influence product consumption, individuals' perceptions of the world, and life-altering decisions. These systems are often evaluated or trained with data from users already exposed to algorithmic recommendations; this creates a pernicious feedback loop. Using simulations, we demonstrate how using data confounded in this way homogenizes user behavior without increasing utility