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Main Authors: Zhang, Yansen, He, Bowei, Zhang, Xiaokun, Wu, Haolun, Sun, Zexu, Ma, Chen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21165
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_version_ 1866909645645283328
author Zhang, Yansen
He, Bowei
Zhang, Xiaokun
Wu, Haolun
Sun, Zexu
Ma, Chen
author_facet Zhang, Yansen
He, Bowei
Zhang, Xiaokun
Wu, Haolun
Sun, Zexu
Ma, Chen
contents Existing recommender systems tend to prioritize items closely aligned with users' historical interactions, inevitably trapping users in the dilemma of ``filter bubble''. Recent efforts are dedicated to improving the diversity of recommendations. However, they mainly suffer from two major issues: 1) a lack of explainability, making it difficult for the system designers to understand how diverse recommendations are generated, and 2) limitations to specific metrics, with difficulty in enhancing non-differentiable diversity metrics. To this end, we propose a \textbf{C}ounterfactual \textbf{M}ulti-player \textbf{B}andits (CMB) method to deliver explainable recommendation diversification across a wide range of diversity metrics. Leveraging a counterfactual framework, our method identifies the factors influencing diversity outcomes. Meanwhile, we adopt the multi-player bandits to optimize the counterfactual optimization objective, making it adaptable to both differentiable and non-differentiable diversity metrics. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the applicability, effectiveness, and explainability of the proposed CMB.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21165
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Counterfactual Multi-player Bandits for Explainable Recommendation Diversification
Zhang, Yansen
He, Bowei
Zhang, Xiaokun
Wu, Haolun
Sun, Zexu
Ma, Chen
Information Retrieval
Existing recommender systems tend to prioritize items closely aligned with users' historical interactions, inevitably trapping users in the dilemma of ``filter bubble''. Recent efforts are dedicated to improving the diversity of recommendations. However, they mainly suffer from two major issues: 1) a lack of explainability, making it difficult for the system designers to understand how diverse recommendations are generated, and 2) limitations to specific metrics, with difficulty in enhancing non-differentiable diversity metrics. To this end, we propose a \textbf{C}ounterfactual \textbf{M}ulti-player \textbf{B}andits (CMB) method to deliver explainable recommendation diversification across a wide range of diversity metrics. Leveraging a counterfactual framework, our method identifies the factors influencing diversity outcomes. Meanwhile, we adopt the multi-player bandits to optimize the counterfactual optimization objective, making it adaptable to both differentiable and non-differentiable diversity metrics. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the applicability, effectiveness, and explainability of the proposed CMB.
title Counterfactual Multi-player Bandits for Explainable Recommendation Diversification
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21165