Breaking the Cold-Start Barrier: Reinforcement Learning with Double and Dueling DQNs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Zhao, Minda
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhao, Minda
author_facet Zhao, Minda
contents Recommender systems struggle to provide accurate suggestions to new users with limited interaction history, a challenge known as the cold-user problem. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning approach using Double and Dueling Deep Q-Networks (DQN) to dynamically learn user preferences from sparse feedback, enhancing recommendation accuracy without relying on sensitive demographic data. By integrating these advanced DQN variants with a matrix factorization model, we achieve superior performance on a large e-commerce dataset compared to traditional methods like popularity-based and active learning strategies. Experimental results show that our method, particularly Dueling DQN, reduces Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for cold users, offering an effective solution for privacy-constrained environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_21259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Breaking the Cold-Start Barrier: Reinforcement Learning with Double and Dueling DQNs
Zhao, Minda
Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
Recommender systems struggle to provide accurate suggestions to new users with limited interaction history, a challenge known as the cold-user problem. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning approach using Double and Dueling Deep Q-Networks (DQN) to dynamically learn user preferences from sparse feedback, enhancing recommendation accuracy without relying on sensitive demographic data. By integrating these advanced DQN variants with a matrix factorization model, we achieve superior performance on a large e-commerce dataset compared to traditional methods like popularity-based and active learning strategies. Experimental results show that our method, particularly Dueling DQN, reduces Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for cold users, offering an effective solution for privacy-constrained environments.
title Breaking the Cold-Start Barrier: Reinforcement Learning with Double and Dueling DQNs
topic Information Retrieval
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21259