arXiv Machine Learning

Designing for the Next Click: Bandits for Real-Time Page Layout

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

Long-term User Engagement Optimization through Model-agnostic Downstream Rewards Learning

arXiv:2607. 14192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As recommender systems mature in the past few years, their optimization objectives have evolved from a primary focusing on short-term behavioral signals to a broader emphasis on long-term user engagement and retention.

By Dingsu Wang, Filip Ryzner, Kelly He, Armando Ordorica, David Woo, Aditya Mantha, Liyao Lu, Usha Amrutha Nookala, Haoran Guo, Jiacong He, Olafur Gudmundsson, Matt Chun, Krystal Benitez, Dhruvil Deven Badani, Yijie Dylan Wang
arXiv AI
4d ago

Challenges and Solutions for Bandits in the Wild: Warm-Started Mixture Bandits for Cross-Cohort Slate Recommendation

arXiv:2609.37800v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many recommender services repeatedly encounter cold-start cohorts, where new users arrive with little or no interaction history. This creates two cha...

By Serafima Lebedeva, Sumantrak Mukherjee, Ali Arshad Sadal, Ilias Ek\c{s}i, Rahul Sharma, Julia Mueller, Theresa Dombrowski, Jakob Karolus, Viktor Bengs, Eyke H\"ullermeier, Sebastian Vollmer
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

Bootstrap-Conditioned Action Selection with Tabular Foundation Models

arXiv:2608. 06559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextual bandits offer a natural framework for sample-efficient personalization, but practical deployment remains difficult under sparse, biased interaction data, unreliable uncertainty estimates, and severe cold starts.

By Devansh Gupta, Shiv Tavker, Dmitry Efimov, Suchitra Sathyanarayana, Gitanjali Bhutani, Boris N. Oreshkin
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

RPTune: Learned Context Curation for LLM Catalog Search

RPTune is an end‑to‑end framework that improves in‑context catalog search for small merchant businesses by learning to curate product catalogs and fine‑tuning large language models (LLMs) with catalog‑grounded supervision. It uses an encoder‑reorganizer curator to order and prune products based on LLM feedback, and then applies context‑relative rewards during LLM post‑training. Across seven real merchants and 100 complex conversational queries per merchant, RPTune boosts search accuracy by up to 31.4 percentage points from curation alone and an additional 10.3 points on average from post‑training.

By Chuxuan Hu, Hejie Cui, Norman Huang, Shubham Kumar Bharti, Wang-Chiew Tan, Sercan \"O. Ar{\i}k
arXiv AI
3d ago

RealWorldShop: Benchmarking and Improving Conversational Shopping Agents in Real-World E-commerce

RealWorldShop introduces a new benchmark for conversational shopping agents, featuring 3.28 million grounded products, structured shopping episodes, a profile‑grounded user simulator, and role‑play evaluation. Analysis reveals that existing systems generate locally plausible responses but struggle with state tracking, constraint updating, and grounded convergence, especially in ambiguous or multi‑intent scenarios. The authors propose REALSHOP_AGENT, a session‑control framework with explicit state management, shopping‑flow control, catalog‑grounded retrieval, and runtime guards, which consistently outperforms strong baselines on the benchmark.

By Xinwei Yang, Kelong Mao, Yudong Guo, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu, Chen Huang, Wenqiang Lei