Driven by the need to capture users' evolving interests and optimize their long-term experiences, more and more recommender systems have started to model recommendation as a Markov decision process and employ reinforcement learning to address the problem. Shouldn't research on the fairness of recommender systems follow the same trend from static evaluation and one-shot intervention to dynamic monitoring and non-stop control? In this paper, we portray the recent developments in recommender systems first and then discuss how fairness could be baked into the reinforcement learning techniques for recommendation. Moreover, we argue that in order to make further progress in recommendation fairness, we may want to consider multi-agent (game-theoretic) optimization, multi-objective (Pareto) optimization, and simulation-based optimization, in the general framework of stochastic games.
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Fast developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled various applied systems deployed in the real world, impacting people's everyday lives. However, many current AI systems were found vulnerable to imperceptible attacks, biased against underrepresented groups, lacking in user privacy protection, etc., which not only degrades user experience but erodes the society's trust in all AI systems. In this review, we strive to provide AI practitioners a comprehensive guide towards building trustworthy AI systems. We first introduce the theoretical framework of important aspects of AI trustworthiness, including robustness, generalization, explainability, transparency, reproducibility, fairness, privacy preservation, alignment with human values, and accountability. We then survey leading approaches in these aspects in the industry. To unify the current fragmented approaches towards trustworthy AI, we propose a systematic approach that considers the entire lifecycle of AI systems, ranging from data acquisition to model development, to development and deployment, finally to continuous monitoring and governance. In this framework, we offer concrete action items to practitioners and societal stakeholders (e.g., researchers and regulators) to improve AI trustworthiness. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges in the future development of trustworthy AI systems, where we identify the need for paradigm shift towards comprehensive trustworthy AI systems.
Recent work has proposed stochastic Plackett-Luce (PL) ranking models as a robust choice for optimizing relevance and fairness metrics. Unlike their deterministic counterparts that require heuristic optimization algorithms, PL models are fully differentiable. Theoretically, they can be used to optimize ranking metrics via stochastic gradient descent. However, in practice, the computation of the gradient is infeasible because it requires one to iterate over all possible permutations of items. Consequently, actual applications rely on approximating the gradient via sampling techniques. In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm: PL-Rank, that estimates the gradient of a PL ranking model w.r.t. both relevance and fairness metrics. Unlike existing approaches that are based on policy gradients, PL-Rank makes use of the specific structure of PL models and ranking metrics. Our experimental analysis shows that PL-Rank has a greater sample-efficiency and is computationally less costly than existing policy gradients, resulting in faster convergence at higher performance. PL-Rank further enables the industry to apply PL models for more relevant and fairer real-world ranking systems.
Rankings, especially those in search and recommendation systems, often determine how people access information and how information is exposed to people. Therefore, how to balance the relevance and fairness of information exposure is considered as one of the key problems for modern IR systems. As conventional ranking frameworks that myopically sorts documents with their relevance will inevitably introduce unfair result exposure, recent studies on ranking fairness mostly focus on dynamic ranking paradigms where result rankings can be adapted in real-time to support fairness in groups (i.e., races, genders, etc.). Existing studies on fairness in dynamic learning to rank, however, often achieve the overall fairness of document exposure in ranked lists by significantly sacrificing the performance of result relevance and fairness on the top results. To address this problem, we propose a fair and unbiased ranking method named Maximal Marginal Fairness (MMF). The algorithm integrates unbiased estimators for both relevance and merit-based fairness while providing an explicit controller that balances the selection of documents to maximize the marginal relevance and fairness in top-k results. Theoretical and empirical analysis shows that, with small compromises on long list fairness, our method achieves superior efficiency and effectiveness comparing to the state-of-the-art algorithms in both relevance and fairness for top-k rankings.
To solve the information explosion problem and enhance user experience in various online applications, recommender systems have been developed to model users preferences. Although numerous efforts have been made toward more personalized recommendations, recommender systems still suffer from several challenges, such as data sparsity and cold start. In recent years, generating recommendations with the knowledge graph as side information has attracted considerable interest. Such an approach can not only alleviate the abovementioned issues for a more accurate recommendation, but also provide explanations for recommended items. In this paper, we conduct a systematical survey of knowledge graph-based recommender systems. We collect recently published papers in this field and summarize them from two perspectives. On the one hand, we investigate the proposed algorithms by focusing on how the papers utilize the knowledge graph for accurate and explainable recommendation. On the other hand, we introduce datasets used in these works. Finally, we propose several potential research directions in this field.
We investigate the problem of fair recommendation in the context of two-sided online platforms, comprising customers on one side and producers on the other. Traditionally, recommendation services in these platforms have focused on maximizing customer satisfaction by tailoring the results according to the personalized preferences of individual customers. However, our investigation reveals that such customer-centric design may lead to unfair distribution of exposure among the producers, which may adversely impact their well-being. On the other hand, a producer-centric design might become unfair to the customers. Thus, we consider fairness issues that span both customers and producers. Our approach involves a novel mapping of the fair recommendation problem to a constrained version of the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods. Our proposed FairRec algorithm guarantees at least Maximin Share (MMS) of exposure for most of the producers and Envy-Free up to One item (EF1) fairness for every customer. Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the effectiveness of FairRec in ensuring two-sided fairness while incurring a marginal loss in the overall recommendation quality.
Explainable recommendation attempts to develop models that generate not only high-quality recommendations but also intuitive explanations. The explanations may either be post-hoc or directly come from an explainable model (also called interpretable or transparent model in some context). Explainable recommendation tries to address the problem of why: by providing explanations to users or system designers, it helps humans to understand why certain items are recommended by the algorithm, where the human can either be users or system designers. Explainable recommendation helps to improve the transparency, persuasiveness, effectiveness, trustworthiness, and satisfaction of recommendation systems. In this survey, we review works on explainable recommendation in or before the year of 2019. We first highlight the position of explainable recommendation in recommender system research by categorizing recommendation problems into the 5W, i.e., what, when, who, where, and why. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of explainable recommendation on three perspectives: 1) We provide a chronological research timeline of explainable recommendation, including user study approaches in the early years and more recent model-based approaches. 2) We provide a two-dimensional taxonomy to classify existing explainable recommendation research: one dimension is the information source (or display style) of the explanations, and the other dimension is the algorithmic mechanism to generate explainable recommendations. 3) We summarize how explainable recommendation applies to different recommendation tasks, such as product recommendation, social recommendation, and POI recommendation. We also devote a section to discuss the explanation perspectives in broader IR and AI/ML research. We end the survey by discussing potential future directions to promote the explainable recommendation research area and beyond.
To address the sparsity and cold start problem of collaborative filtering, researchers usually make use of side information, such as social networks or item attributes, to improve recommendation performance. This paper considers the knowledge graph as the source of side information. To address the limitations of existing embedding-based and path-based methods for knowledge-graph-aware recommendation, we propose Ripple Network, an end-to-end framework that naturally incorporates the knowledge graph into recommender systems. Similar to actual ripples propagating on the surface of water, Ripple Network stimulates the propagation of user preferences over the set of knowledge entities by automatically and iteratively extending a user's potential interests along links in the knowledge graph. The multiple "ripples" activated by a user's historically clicked items are thus superposed to form the preference distribution of the user with respect to a candidate item, which could be used for predicting the final clicking probability. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that Ripple Network achieves substantial gains in a variety of scenarios, including movie, book and news recommendation, over several state-of-the-art baselines.
Rankings of people and items are at the heart of selection-making, match-making, and recommender systems, ranging from employment sites to sharing economy platforms. As ranking positions influence the amount of attention the ranked subjects receive, biases in rankings can lead to unfair distribution of opportunities and resources, such as jobs or income. This paper proposes new measures and mechanisms to quantify and mitigate unfairness from a bias inherent to all rankings, namely, the position bias, which leads to disproportionately less attention being paid to low-ranked subjects. Our approach differs from recent fair ranking approaches in two important ways. First, existing works measure unfairness at the level of subject groups while our measures capture unfairness at the level of individual subjects, and as such subsume group unfairness. Second, as no single ranking can achieve individual attention fairness, we propose a novel mechanism that achieves amortized fairness, where attention accumulated across a series of rankings is proportional to accumulated relevance. We formulate the challenge of achieving amortized individual fairness subject to constraints on ranking quality as an online optimization problem and show that it can be solved as an integer linear program. Our experimental evaluation reveals that unfair attention distribution in rankings can be substantial, and demonstrates that our method can improve individual fairness while retaining high ranking quality.
Recommender systems are one of the most successful applications of data mining and machine learning technology in practice. Academic research in the field is historically often based on the matrix completion problem formulation, where for each user-item-pair only one interaction (e.g., a rating) is considered. In many application domains, however, multiple user-item interactions of different types can be recorded over time. And, a number of recent works have shown that this information can be used to build richer individual user models and to discover additional behavioral patterns that can be leveraged in the recommendation process. In this work we review existing works that consider information from such sequentially-ordered user- item interaction logs in the recommendation process. Based on this review, we propose a categorization of the corresponding recommendation tasks and goals, summarize existing algorithmic solutions, discuss methodological approaches when benchmarking what we call sequence-aware recommender systems, and outline open challenges in the area.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
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