SUBER: An RL Environment with Simulated Human Behavior for Recommender Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Corecco, Nathan, Piatti, Giorgio, Lanzendörfer, Luca A., Fan, Flint Xiaofeng, Wattenhofer, Roger
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Corecco, Nathan
Piatti, Giorgio
Lanzendörfer, Luca A.
Fan, Flint Xiaofeng
Wattenhofer, Roger
author_facet Corecco, Nathan
Piatti, Giorgio
Lanzendörfer, Luca A.
Fan, Flint Xiaofeng
Wattenhofer, Roger
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained popularity in the realm of recommender systems due to its ability to optimize long-term rewards and guide users in discovering relevant content. However, the successful implementation of RL in recommender systems is challenging because of several factors, including the limited availability of online data for training on-policy methods. This scarcity requires expensive human interaction for online model training. Furthermore, the development of effective evaluation frameworks that accurately reflect the quality of models remains a fundamental challenge in recommender systems. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive framework for synthetic environments that simulate human behavior by harnessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We complement our framework with in-depth ablation studies and demonstrate its effectiveness with experiments on movie and book recommendations. Using LLMs as synthetic users, this work introduces a modular and novel framework to train RL-based recommender systems. The software, including the RL environment, is publicly available on GitHub.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_01631
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SUBER: An RL Environment with Simulated Human Behavior for Recommender Systems
Corecco, Nathan
Piatti, Giorgio
Lanzendörfer, Luca A.
Fan, Flint Xiaofeng
Wattenhofer, Roger
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained popularity in the realm of recommender systems due to its ability to optimize long-term rewards and guide users in discovering relevant content. However, the successful implementation of RL in recommender systems is challenging because of several factors, including the limited availability of online data for training on-policy methods. This scarcity requires expensive human interaction for online model training. Furthermore, the development of effective evaluation frameworks that accurately reflect the quality of models remains a fundamental challenge in recommender systems. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive framework for synthetic environments that simulate human behavior by harnessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We complement our framework with in-depth ablation studies and demonstrate its effectiveness with experiments on movie and book recommendations. Using LLMs as synthetic users, this work introduces a modular and novel framework to train RL-based recommender systems. The software, including the RL environment, is publicly available on GitHub.
title SUBER: An RL Environment with Simulated Human Behavior for Recommender Systems
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01631