Ranking with Long-Term Constraints

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Brantley, Kianté, Fang, Zhichong, Dean, Sarah, Joachims, Thorsten
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909063660437504
author Brantley, Kianté
Fang, Zhichong
Dean, Sarah
Joachims, Thorsten
author_facet Brantley, Kianté
Fang, Zhichong
Dean, Sarah
Joachims, Thorsten
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_04923
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ranking with Long-Term Constraints
Brantley, Kianté
Fang, Zhichong
Dean, Sarah
Joachims, Thorsten
Information Retrieval
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.
title Ranking with Long-Term Constraints
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04923