RecoMind: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Optimizing In-Session User Satisfaction in Recommendation Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ayed, Mehdi Ben, Feng, Fei, Adams, Jay, Singh, Vishwakarma, Anand, Kritarth, Xu, Jiajing
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Ayed, Mehdi Ben
Feng, Fei
Adams, Jay
Singh, Vishwakarma
Anand, Kritarth
Xu, Jiajing
author_facet Ayed, Mehdi Ben
Feng, Fei
Adams, Jay
Singh, Vishwakarma
Anand, Kritarth
Xu, Jiajing
contents Existing web-scale recommendation systems commonly use supervised learning methods that prioritize immediate user feedback. Although reinforcement learning (RL) offers a solution to optimize longer-term goals, such as in-session engagement, applying it at web scale is challenging due to the extremely large action space and engineering complexity. In this paper, we introduce RecoMind, a simulator-based RL framework designed for the effective optimization of session-based goals at web-scale. RecoMind leverages existing recommendation models to establish a simulation environment and to bootstrap the RL policy to optimize immediate user interactions from the outset. This method integrates well with existing industry pipelines, simplifying the training and deployment of RL policies. Additionally, RecoMind introduces a custom exploration strategy to efficiently explore web-scale action spaces with hundreds of millions of items. We evaluated RecoMind through extensive offline simulations and online A/B testing on a video streaming platform. Both methods showed that the RL policy trained using RecoMind significantly outperforms traditional supervised learning recommendation approaches in in-session user satisfaction. In online A/B tests, the RL policy increased videos watched for more than 10 seconds by 15.81\% and improved session depth by 4.71\% for sessions with at least 10 interactions. As a result, RecoMind presents a systematic and scalable approach for embedding RL into web-scale recommendation systems, showing great promise for optimizing session-based user satisfaction.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00201
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RecoMind: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Optimizing In-Session User Satisfaction in Recommendation Systems
Ayed, Mehdi Ben
Feng, Fei
Adams, Jay
Singh, Vishwakarma
Anand, Kritarth
Xu, Jiajing
Machine Learning
Existing web-scale recommendation systems commonly use supervised learning methods that prioritize immediate user feedback. Although reinforcement learning (RL) offers a solution to optimize longer-term goals, such as in-session engagement, applying it at web scale is challenging due to the extremely large action space and engineering complexity. In this paper, we introduce RecoMind, a simulator-based RL framework designed for the effective optimization of session-based goals at web-scale. RecoMind leverages existing recommendation models to establish a simulation environment and to bootstrap the RL policy to optimize immediate user interactions from the outset. This method integrates well with existing industry pipelines, simplifying the training and deployment of RL policies. Additionally, RecoMind introduces a custom exploration strategy to efficiently explore web-scale action spaces with hundreds of millions of items. We evaluated RecoMind through extensive offline simulations and online A/B testing on a video streaming platform. Both methods showed that the RL policy trained using RecoMind significantly outperforms traditional supervised learning recommendation approaches in in-session user satisfaction. In online A/B tests, the RL policy increased videos watched for more than 10 seconds by 15.81\% and improved session depth by 4.71\% for sessions with at least 10 interactions. As a result, RecoMind presents a systematic and scalable approach for embedding RL into web-scale recommendation systems, showing great promise for optimizing session-based user satisfaction.
title RecoMind: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Optimizing In-Session User Satisfaction in Recommendation Systems
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00201