arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Incremental Recommendation via Causal Models

The paper proposes an incremental recommendation system that uses causal modeling to avoid delivering redundant recommendations. By leveraging existing holdback data and a dual‑threshold targeting policy, the authors reduce recommendation impressions by 7% without harming overall content consumption. Joint training with holdback data also improves the calibration of the treated model, suggesting better generalisable representations than purely observational models.

By Athanasios Vlontzos, David Gustafsson, Michael O'Riordan, Ciar\'an M. Gilligan-Lee
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Incremental Recommendation via Causal Models

The paper proposes an incremental recommendation approach that uses a causal model built from existing holdback data to avoid delivering redundant recommendations. By applying a dual‑threshold targeting policy, the system only recommends content when the likelihood of a treated stream is high and the likelihood of an organic stream is low, thereby reducing recommendation impressions by 7% without hurting overall consumption. Joint training with holdback data also improves the calibration of the treated head, suggesting that causal models capture more generalisable representations than purely observational models.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

PUID: A Personalized Deconfounding Framework for Recommender Systems under Hidden Confounding

The paper introduces PUID, a Personalized Unobserved-Confounding-aware Interaction Deconfounder, designed to mitigate hidden confounding in recommender systems without relying on costly randomized controlled trials. PUID estimates user-item level sensitivity bounds using an entropy-based method that gauges the strength of hidden confounding from the mutual information between observed features and exposure status. An adversarial optimization strategy and a benchmark-guided variant (BPUID) further enhance robustness and predictive accuracy, and experiments on three real-world datasets show consistent outperformance over state-of-the-art baselines.

By Zongyu Li