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

Nowadays, recommender systems are employed across a diverse set of application domains, not only supporting us in our decision making and choices but also helping us to discover and find new items, products, and services much more efficiently. The commonly used approach in recommender systems is receiver-centric (or user-centric) where the focus is on satisfying the receiver of the recommendations without any considerations for business & strategic objectives or the objectives of the item providers. [...]@en

Two typical forms of bias in user interaction data with recommender systems (RSs) are popularity bias and positivity bias, which manifest themselves as the over-representation of interactions with popular items or items that users prefer, respectively. Debiasing methods aim to mitigate the effect of selection bias on the evaluation and optimization of RSs. However, existing debiasing methods only consider single-factor forms of bias, e.g., only the item (popularity) or only the rating value (positivity). This is in stark contrast with the real world where user selections are generally affected by multiple factors at once. In this work, we consider multifactorial selection bias in RSs. Our focus is on selection bias affected by both item and rating value factors, which is a generalization and combination of popularity and positivity bias. While the concept of multifactorial bias is intuitive, it brings a severe practical challenge as it requires substantially more data for accurate bias estimation. As a solution, we propose smoothing and alternating gradient descent techniques to reduce variance and improve the robustness of its optimization. Our experimental results reveal that, with our proposed techniques, multifactorial bias corrections are more effective and robust than single-factor counterparts on real-world and synthetic datasets.@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