Exploring the Escalation of Source Bias in User, Data, and Recommender System Feedback Loop

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhou, Yuqi, Dai, Sunhao, Pang, Liang, Wang, Gang, Dong, Zhenhua, Xu, Jun, Wen, Ji-Rong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Zhou, Yuqi
Dai, Sunhao
Pang, Liang
Wang, Gang
Dong, Zhenhua
Xu, Jun
Wen, Ji-Rong
author_facet Zhou, Yuqi
Dai, Sunhao
Pang, Liang
Wang, Gang
Dong, Zhenhua
Xu, Jun
Wen, Ji-Rong
contents Recommender systems are essential for information access, allowing users to present their content for recommendation. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), AI-generated content (AIGC), primarily in the form of text, has become a central part of the content ecosystem. As AIGC becomes increasingly prevalent, it is important to understand how it affects the performance and dynamics of recommender systems. To this end, we construct an environment that incorporates AIGC to explore its short-term impact. The results from popular sequential recommendation models reveal that AIGC are ranked higher in the recommender system, reflecting the phenomenon of source bias. To further explore the long-term impact of AIGC, we introduce a feedback loop with realistic simulators. The results show that the model's preference for AIGC increases as the user clicks on AIGC rises and the model trains on simulated click data. This leads to two issues: In the short term, bias toward AIGC encourages LLM-based content creation, increasing AIGC content, and causing unfair traffic distribution. From a long-term perspective, our experiments also show that when AIGC dominates the content ecosystem after a feedback loop, it can lead to a decline in recommendation performance. To address these issues, we propose a debiasing method based on L1-loss optimization to maintain long-term content ecosystem balance. In a real-world environment with AIGC generated by mainstream LLMs, our method ensures a balance between AIGC and human-generated content in the ecosystem. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Yuqi-Zhou/Rec_SourceBias.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_17998
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring the Escalation of Source Bias in User, Data, and Recommender System Feedback Loop
Zhou, Yuqi
Dai, Sunhao
Pang, Liang
Wang, Gang
Dong, Zhenhua
Xu, Jun
Wen, Ji-Rong
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Recommender systems are essential for information access, allowing users to present their content for recommendation. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), AI-generated content (AIGC), primarily in the form of text, has become a central part of the content ecosystem. As AIGC becomes increasingly prevalent, it is important to understand how it affects the performance and dynamics of recommender systems. To this end, we construct an environment that incorporates AIGC to explore its short-term impact. The results from popular sequential recommendation models reveal that AIGC are ranked higher in the recommender system, reflecting the phenomenon of source bias. To further explore the long-term impact of AIGC, we introduce a feedback loop with realistic simulators. The results show that the model's preference for AIGC increases as the user clicks on AIGC rises and the model trains on simulated click data. This leads to two issues: In the short term, bias toward AIGC encourages LLM-based content creation, increasing AIGC content, and causing unfair traffic distribution. From a long-term perspective, our experiments also show that when AIGC dominates the content ecosystem after a feedback loop, it can lead to a decline in recommendation performance. To address these issues, we propose a debiasing method based on L1-loss optimization to maintain long-term content ecosystem balance. In a real-world environment with AIGC generated by mainstream LLMs, our method ensures a balance between AIGC and human-generated content in the ecosystem. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Yuqi-Zhou/Rec_SourceBias.
title Exploring the Escalation of Source Bias in User, Data, and Recommender System Feedback Loop
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17998