September 12, 2023
Auction-based recommender systems are prevalent in online advertising platforms, but they are typically optimized to allocate recommendation slots based on immediate expected return metrics, neglecting the downstream effects of recommendations on user behavior. In this study, we employ reinforcement learning to optimize for long-term return metrics in an auction-based recommender system. Utilizing temporal difference learning, a fundamental reinforcement learning algorithm, we implement a one-step policy improvement approach that biases the system towards recommendations with higher long-term user engagement metrics. This optimizes value over long horizons while maintaining compatibility with the auction framework. Our approach is grounded in dynamic programming ideas which show that our method provably improves upon the existing auction-based base policy. Through an online A/B test conducted on an auction-based recommender system which handles billions of impressions and users daily, we empirically establish that our proposed method outperforms the current production system in terms of long-term user engagement metrics.
Publisher
RecSys
February 15, 2024
Danny Deng, Hongkuan Zhou, Hanqing Zeng, Yinglong Xia, Chris Leung (AI), Jianbo Li, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor Prasanna
February 15, 2024
January 06, 2024
Geng Ji, Wentao Jiang, Jiang Li, Fahmid Morshed Fahid, Zhengxing Chen, Yinghua Li, Jun Xiao, Chongxi Bao, Zheqing (Bill) Zhu
January 06, 2024
December 11, 2023
Dishank Bansal, Ricky Chen, Mustafa Mukadam, Brandon Amos
December 11, 2023
October 26, 2023
Daniel Jiang
October 26, 2023
Product experiences
Foundational models
Product experiences
Latest news
Foundational models