A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
The paper proposes a method to learn and leverage contextual preference distributions for better decision-making.
problem Heterogeneous and context-dependent human preferences in decision-making problems.
method A sequential learning-and-optimization pipeline using a bounded-variance score function gradient estimator to train a predictive model mapping contextual features to preference distributions.
result The approach reduces average post-decision surprise by up to 25 times compared to risk-averse baselines in a ridesharing environment.
Efficiently identifies good policies by choosing contexts for human feedback.
problem Efficiently acquiring human feedback for preference alignment in large language models.
method Formalizes active exploration as a dueling bandit problem and proposes an active exploration algorithm with a polynomial worst-case regret bound.
result Proposed method outperforms baselines with limited human preferences on various language models and datasets.
Negative user preference is an important context that is not sufficiently utilized by many existing recommender systems. This context is especially useful in scenarios where the cost of negative items is high for the users. In this work, we describe a new recommender algorithm that explicitly models negative user prefe…
The recent adoption of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for session modeling has yielded substantial performance gains compared to previous approaches. In terms of context-aware session modeling, however, the existing RNN-based models are limited in that they are not designed to explicitly model rich static user-side c…
Contextual bandit learning is an increasingly popular approach to optimizing recommender systems via user feedback, but can be slow to converge in practice due to the need for exploring a large feature space. In this paper, we propose a coarse-to-fine hierarchical approach for encoding prior knowledge that drastically …
An algorithm for efficient experimentation in a dynamic environment with personalized preferences and context drifts.
problem Efficiently recommending decisions to users with personalized preferences in a context where the environment is changing over time.
method Dri-MED, inspired from the linear version of the MED strategy, adapted to handle non-stationary heteroskedastic noise.
result The instance-dependent regret scales as $ ilde{\mathcal O}\left(\fracκ{ ildeΔ}d^2(\log(T)
ight)$, with ildeΔ being the constraint-aware sub-optimality gap.
The paper tackles carousel personalization in music streaming apps using contextual bandits.
problem Selecting relevant items to display in carousels for personalized content recommendation.
method Modeling carousel personalization as a contextual multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays, cascade-based updates and delayed batch feedback.
result Empirically shows the effectiveness of the framework in capturing characteristics of real-world carousels.
Improved off-policy selection and learning in contextual bandits with better guarantees.
problem Selecting or training a reward-maximizing policy using data from a fixed behavior policy.
method A betting-based confidence bound applied to an inverse propensity weight sequence for off-policy selection, and a freezing condition for off-policy learning.
result The proposed methods achieve significantly improved guarantees over prior work, especially in small-data regimes.
This paper improves recommender systems by handling dynamic user preferences and item popularity.
problem Dynamic user preferences and changing item popularity in recommender systems.
method Developed a Thompson sampling-based policy for a high-dimensional linear bandit problem, reducing feature vector dimensionality and using exponentially increasing weights.
result Proved a regret bound that scales with the reduced dimension, demonstrating effectiveness in trade-off between computational complexity and regret performance.
Multi-armed bandit algorithms have become a reference solution for handling the explore/exploit dilemma in recommender systems, and many other important real-world problems, such as display advertisement. However, such algorithms usually assume a stationary reward distribution, which hardly holds in practice as users' …
A rising topic in computational journalism is how to enhance the diversity in news served to subscribers to foster exploration behavior in news reading. Despite the success of preference learning in personalized news recommendation, their over-exploitation causes filter bubble that isolates readers from opposing viewpo…