Capacity-aware Sequential Recommendations

Abstract

Personalized recommendations are increasingly important to engage users and guide them through large systems, for example when recommending points of interest to tourists visiting a popular city. To maximize long-term user experience, the system should consider issuing recommendations sequentially, since by observing the user's response to a recommendation, the system can update its estimate of the user's (latent) interests. However, as traditional recommender systems target individuals, their effect on a collective of users can unintentionally overload capacity. Therefore, recommender systems should not only consider the users' interests, but also the effect of recommendations on the available capacity.

The structure in such a constrained, multi-agent, partially observable decision problem can be exploited by a novel belief-space sampling algorithm which bounds the size of the state space by a limit on regret. By exploiting the stationary structure of the problem, our algorithm is significantly more scalable than existing approximate solvers. Moreover, by explicitly considering the information value of actions, this algorithm significantly improves the quality of recommendations over an extension of posterior sampling reinforcement learning to the constrained multi-agent case. We show how to decouple constraint satisfaction from sequential recommendation policies, resulting in algorithms which issue recommendations to thousands of agents while respecting constraints.