Exposure bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where items and suppliers are not equally represented in the recommendation results. This bias becomes particularly problematic over time as a few items are repeatedly over-represented in recommendation lists, leading to a feedback loop that further amplifies this bias. Although extensive research has addressed this issue in model-based or neighborhood-based recommendation algorithms, less attention has been paid to online recommendation models, such as those based on top-K contextual bandits, where recommendation models are dynamically updated with ongoing user feedback. In this paper, we study exposure bias in a class of well-known contextual bandit algorithms known as Linear Cascading Bandits,. We analyze these algorithms in their ability to handle exposure bias and provide a fair representation of items in the recommendation results. Our analysis reveals that these algorithms fail to mitigate exposure bias in the long run during the course of ongoing user interactions. We propose an Exposure-Aware reward model that updates the model parameters based on two factors: 1) implicit user feedback and 2) the position of the item in the recommendation list. The proposed model mitigates exposure bias by controlling the utility assigned to the items based on their exposure in the recommendation list. Our experiments with two real-world datasets show that our proposed reward model improves the exposure fairness of the linear cascading bandits over time while maintaining the recommendation accuracy. It also outperforms the current baselines. Finally, we prove a high probability upper regret bound for our proposed model, providing theoretical guarantees for its performance.@en

Calibration in recommender systems is an important performance criterion that ensures consistency between the distribution of user preference categories and that of recommendations generated by the system. Standard methods for mitigating miscalibration typically assume that user preference profiles are static, and they measure calibration relative to the full history of user’s interactions, including possibly outdated and stale preference categories. We conjecture that this approach can lead to recommendations that, while appearing calibrated, in fact, distort users’ true preferences. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary investigation of recommendation calibration at a more granular level, taking into account evolving user preferences. By analyzing differently sized training time windows from the most recent interactions to the oldest, we identify the most relevant segment of user’s preferences that optimizes the calibration metric. We perform an exploratory analysis with datasets from different domains with distinctive user-interaction characteristics. We demonstrate how the evolving nature of user preferences affects recommendation calibration, and how this effect is manifested differently depending on the characteristics of the data in a given domain. Datasets, codes, and more detailed experimental results are available at: https://github.com/nicolelin13/DynamicCalibrationUMAP@en

During the past decade, recommender systems have rapidly become an indispensable element of websites, apps, and other platforms that seek to provide personalized interactions to their users. As recommendation technologies are applied to an ever-growing array of non-standard problems and scenarios, researchers and practitioners are also increasingly faced with challenges of dealing with greater variety and complexity in the inputs to those recommender systems. For example, there has been more reliance on fine-grained user signals as inputs rather than simple ratings or likes. Applications require more complex domain-specific constraints on inputs to the recommender systems. Likewise, the outputs of recommender systems are moving towards more complex composite items, such as package or sequence recommendations. This increasing complexity requires smarter recommender algorithms that can deal with this diversity in inputs and outputs. For the past four years, the ComplexRec workshop series has offered an interactive venue for discussing approaches to recommendation in complex scenarios that have no simple one-size-fits-all solution.

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ACM UMAP - User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization is the premier international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users, to groups of users, and that collect, represent, and model user information. The Theory, Opinion and Reflection (TOR) track at UMAP is designed to highlight emerging areas of inquiry in UMAP and to promote discussion of potentially visionary ideas.@en