Churn-Aware Recommendation Planning under Aggregated Preference Feedback

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Auteurs principaux: Keinan, Gur, Ben-Porat, Omer
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Keinan, Gur
Ben-Porat, Omer
author_facet Keinan, Gur
Ben-Porat, Omer
contents We study a sequential decision-making problem motivated by recent regulatory and technological shifts that limit access to individual user data in recommender systems (RSs), leaving only population-level preference information. This privacy-aware setting poses fundamental challenges in planning under uncertainty: Effective personalization requires exploration to infer user preferences, yet unsatisfactory recommendations risk immediate user churn. To address this, we introduce the Rec-APC model, in which an anonymous user is drawn from a known prior over latent user types (e.g., personas or clusters), and the decision-maker sequentially selects items to recommend. Feedback is binary -- positive responses refine the posterior via Bayesian updates, while negative responses result in the termination of the session. We prove that optimal policies converge to pure exploitation in finite time and propose a branch-and-bound algorithm to efficiently compute them. Experiments on synthetic and MovieLens data confirm rapid convergence and demonstrate that our method outperforms the POMDP solver SARSOP, particularly when the number of user types is large or comparable to the number of content categories. Our results highlight the applicability of this approach and inspire new ways to improve decision-making under the constraints imposed by aggregated preference data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04513
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Churn-Aware Recommendation Planning under Aggregated Preference Feedback
Keinan, Gur
Ben-Porat, Omer
Artificial Intelligence
We study a sequential decision-making problem motivated by recent regulatory and technological shifts that limit access to individual user data in recommender systems (RSs), leaving only population-level preference information. This privacy-aware setting poses fundamental challenges in planning under uncertainty: Effective personalization requires exploration to infer user preferences, yet unsatisfactory recommendations risk immediate user churn. To address this, we introduce the Rec-APC model, in which an anonymous user is drawn from a known prior over latent user types (e.g., personas or clusters), and the decision-maker sequentially selects items to recommend. Feedback is binary -- positive responses refine the posterior via Bayesian updates, while negative responses result in the termination of the session. We prove that optimal policies converge to pure exploitation in finite time and propose a branch-and-bound algorithm to efficiently compute them. Experiments on synthetic and MovieLens data confirm rapid convergence and demonstrate that our method outperforms the POMDP solver SARSOP, particularly when the number of user types is large or comparable to the number of content categories. Our results highlight the applicability of this approach and inspire new ways to improve decision-making under the constraints imposed by aggregated preference data.
title Churn-Aware Recommendation Planning under Aggregated Preference Feedback
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04513