No Arabic abstract
In recent years, there are great interests as well as challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to recommendation systems (RS). In this paper, we summarize three key practical challenges of large-scale RL-based recommender systems: massive state and action spaces, high-variance environment, and the unspecific reward setting in recommendation. All these problems remain largely unexplored in the existing literature and make the application of RL challenging. We develop a model-based reinforcement learning framework, called GoalRec. Inspired by the ideas of world model (model-based), value function estimation (model-free), and goal-based RL, a novel disentangled universal value function designed for item recommendation is proposed. It can generalize to various goals that the recommender may have, and disentangle the stochastic environmental dynamics and high-variance reward signals accordingly. As a part of the value function, free from the sparse and high-variance reward signals, a high-capacity reward-independent world model is trained to simulate complex environmental dynamics under a certain goal. Based on the predicted environmental dynamics, the disentangled universal value function is related to the users future trajectory instead of a monolithic state and a scalar reward. We demonstrate the superiority of GoalRec over previous approaches in terms of the above three practical challenges in a series of simulations and a real application.
Recommendation is crucial in both academia and industry, and various techniques are proposed such as content-based collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, logistic regression, factorization machines, neural networks and multi-armed bandits. However, most of the previous studies suffer from two limitations: (1) considering the recommendation as a static procedure and ignoring the dynamic interactive nature between users and the recommender systems, (2) focusing on the immediate feedback of recommended items and neglecting the long-term rewards. To address the two limitations, in this paper we propose a novel recommendation framework based on deep reinforcement learning, called DRR. The DRR framework treats recommendation as a sequential decision making procedure and adopts an Actor-Critic reinforcement learning scheme to model the interactions between the users and recommender systems, which can consider both the dynamic adaptation and long-term rewards. Furthermore, a state representation module is incorporated into DRR, which can explicitly capture the interactions between items and users. Three instantiation structures are developed. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets are conducted under both the offline and online evaluation settings. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed DRR method indeed outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors.
Both reviews and user-item interactions (i.e., rating scores) have been widely adopted for user rating prediction. However, these existing techniques mainly extract the latent representations for users and items in an independent and static manner. That is, a single static feature vector is derived to encode her preference without considering the particular characteristics of each candidate item. We argue that this static encoding scheme is difficult to fully capture the users preference. In this paper, we propose a novel context-aware user-item representation learning model for rating prediction, named CARL. Namely, CARL derives a joint representation for a given user-item pair based on their individual latent features and latent feature interactions. Then, CARL adopts Factorization Machines to further model higher-order feature interactions on the basis of the user-item pair for rating prediction. Specifically, two separate learning components are devised in CARL to exploit review data and interaction data respectively: review-based feature learning and interaction-based feature learning. In review-based learning component, with convolution operations and attention mechanism, the relevant features for a user-item pair are extracted by jointly considering their corresponding reviews. However, these features are only review-driven and may not be comprehensive. Hence, interaction-based learning component further extracts complementary features from interaction data alone, also on the basis of user-item pairs. The final rating score is then derived with a dynamic linear fusion mechanism. Experiments on five real-world datasets show that CARL achieves significantly better rating prediction accuracy than existing state-of-the-art alternatives. Also, with attention mechanism, we show that the relevant information in reviews can be highlighted to interpret the rating prediction.
Session-based recommendation aims at predicting the next item given a sequence of previous items consumed in the session, e.g., on e-commerce or multimedia streaming services. Specifically, session data exhibits some unique characteristics, i.e., session consistency and sequential dependency over items within the session, repeated item consumption, and session timeliness. In this paper, we propose simple-yet-effective linear models for considering the holistic aspects of the sessions. The comprehensive nature of our models helps improve the quality of session-based recommendation. More importantly, it provides a generalized framework for reflecting different perspectives of session data. Furthermore, since our models can be solved by closed-form solutions, they are highly scalable. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed linear models show competitive or state-of-the-art performance in various metrics on several real-world datasets.
Due to its nature of learning from dynamic interactions and planning for long-run performance, reinforcement learning (RL) recently has received much attention in interactive recommender systems (IRSs). IRSs usually face the large discrete action space problem, which makes most of the existing RL-based recommendation methods inefficient. Moreover, data sparsity is another challenging problem that most IRSs are confronted with. While the textual information like reviews and descriptions is less sensitive to sparsity, existing RL-based recommendation methods either neglect or are not suitable for incorporating textual information. To address these two problems, in this paper, we propose a Text-based Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient framework (TDDPG-Rec) for IRSs. Specifically, we leverage textual information to map items and users into a feature space, which greatly alleviates the sparsity problem. Moreover, we design an effective method to construct an action candidate set. By the policy vector dynamically learned from TDDPG-Rec that expresses the users preference, we can select actions from the candidate set effectively. Through experiments on three public datasets, we demonstrate that TDDPG-Rec achieves state-of-the-art performance over several baselines in a time-efficient manner.
Interactive recommendation aims to learn from dynamic interactions between items and users to achieve responsiveness and accuracy. Reinforcement learning is inherently advantageous for coping with dynamic environments and thus has attracted increasing attention in interactive recommendation research. Inspired by knowledge-aware recommendation, we proposed Knowledge-Guided deep Reinforcement learning (KGRL) to harness the advantages of both reinforcement learning and knowledge graphs for interactive recommendation. This model is implemented upon the actor-critic network framework. It maintains a local knowledge network to guide decision-making and employs the attention mechanism to capture long-term semantics between items. We have conducted comprehensive experiments in a simulated online environment with six public real-world datasets and demonstrated the superiority of our model over several state-of-the-art methods.