Ensuring User-side Fairness in Dynamic Recommender Systems

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Yoo, Hyunsik, Zeng, Zhichen, Kang, Jian, Qiu, Ruizhong, Zhou, David, Liu, Zhining, Wang, Fei, Xu, Charlie, Chan, Eunice, Tong, Hanghang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866908382997250048
author Yoo, Hyunsik
Zeng, Zhichen
Kang, Jian
Qiu, Ruizhong
Zhou, David
Liu, Zhining
Wang, Fei
Xu, Charlie
Chan, Eunice
Tong, Hanghang
author_facet Yoo, Hyunsik
Zeng, Zhichen
Kang, Jian
Qiu, Ruizhong
Zhou, David
Liu, Zhining
Wang, Fei
Xu, Charlie
Chan, Eunice
Tong, Hanghang
contents User-side group fairness is crucial for modern recommender systems, aiming to alleviate performance disparities among user groups defined by sensitive attributes like gender, race, or age. In the ever-evolving landscape of user-item interactions, continual adaptation to newly collected data is crucial for recommender systems to stay aligned with the latest user preferences. However, we observe that such continual adaptation often exacerbates performance disparities. This necessitates a thorough investigation into user-side fairness in dynamic recommender systems, an area that has been unexplored in the literature. This problem is challenging due to distribution shifts, frequent model updates, and non-differentiability of ranking metrics. To our knowledge, this paper presents the first principled study on ensuring user-side fairness in dynamic recommender systems. We start with theoretical analyses on fine-tuning v.s. retraining, showing that the best practice is incremental fine-tuning with restart. Guided by our theoretical analyses, we propose FAir Dynamic rEcommender (FADE), an end-to-end fine-tuning framework to dynamically ensure user-side fairness over time. To overcome the non-differentiability of recommendation metrics in the fairness loss, we further introduce Differentiable Hit (DH) as an improvement over the recent NeuralNDCG method, not only alleviating its gradient vanishing issue but also achieving higher efficiency. Besides that, we also address the instability issue of the fairness loss by leveraging the competing nature between the recommendation loss and the fairness loss. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that FADE effectively and efficiently reduces performance disparities with little sacrifice in the overall recommendation performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_15651
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ensuring User-side Fairness in Dynamic Recommender Systems
Yoo, Hyunsik
Zeng, Zhichen
Kang, Jian
Qiu, Ruizhong
Zhou, David
Liu, Zhining
Wang, Fei
Xu, Charlie
Chan, Eunice
Tong, Hanghang
Information Retrieval
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
User-side group fairness is crucial for modern recommender systems, aiming to alleviate performance disparities among user groups defined by sensitive attributes like gender, race, or age. In the ever-evolving landscape of user-item interactions, continual adaptation to newly collected data is crucial for recommender systems to stay aligned with the latest user preferences. However, we observe that such continual adaptation often exacerbates performance disparities. This necessitates a thorough investigation into user-side fairness in dynamic recommender systems, an area that has been unexplored in the literature. This problem is challenging due to distribution shifts, frequent model updates, and non-differentiability of ranking metrics. To our knowledge, this paper presents the first principled study on ensuring user-side fairness in dynamic recommender systems. We start with theoretical analyses on fine-tuning v.s. retraining, showing that the best practice is incremental fine-tuning with restart. Guided by our theoretical analyses, we propose FAir Dynamic rEcommender (FADE), an end-to-end fine-tuning framework to dynamically ensure user-side fairness over time. To overcome the non-differentiability of recommendation metrics in the fairness loss, we further introduce Differentiable Hit (DH) as an improvement over the recent NeuralNDCG method, not only alleviating its gradient vanishing issue but also achieving higher efficiency. Besides that, we also address the instability issue of the fairness loss by leveraging the competing nature between the recommendation loss and the fairness loss. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that FADE effectively and efficiently reduces performance disparities with little sacrifice in the overall recommendation performance.
title Ensuring User-side Fairness in Dynamic Recommender Systems
topic Information Retrieval
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15651