In plain words: Platforms can set long-term goals—like fair exposure or revenue spread—and new feedback rules adjust rankings to hit them while keeping clicks and purchases up. On synthetic and real data, all rules met targets with little engagement loss, trading off speed, robustness, and foresight.
Abstract
The feedback that users provide through their choices (e.g., clicks, purchases) is one of the most common types of data readily available for training search and recommendation algorithms. However, myopically training systems based on choice data may only improve short-term engagement, but not the long-term sustainability of the platform and the long-term benefits to its users, content providers, and other stakeholders. In this paper, we thus develop a new framework in which decision makers (e.g., platform operators, regulators, users) can express long-term goals for the behavior of the platform (e.g., fairness, revenue distribution, legal requirements). These goals take the form of exposure or impact targets that go well beyond individual sessions, and we provide new control-based algorithms to achieve these goals. In particular, the controllers are designed to achieve the stated long-term goals with minimum impact on short-term engagement. Beyond the principled theoretical derivation of the controllers, we evaluate the algorithms on both synthetic and real-world data. While all controllers perform well, we find that they provide interesting trade-offs in efficiency, robustness, and the ability to plan ahead.
Kianté Brantley, Zhichong Fang, Sarah Dean, Thorsten Joachims
arXiv:2307.04923 · cs.IR · submitted Jul 10, 2023 · updated Jan 8, 2024
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