论文标题
快速在线排名,公平地曝光
Fast online ranking with fairness of exposure
论文作者
论文摘要
随着推荐系统对在线可用内容进行分类和优先级越来越核心,它们对生产商的机会或收入产生了越来越多的影响。例如,他们影响了建议招募简历的音乐,视频或新闻文章的信息,或者是谁以及多少。这要求采用建议方法不仅最大化(代理)用户满意度,而且还要考虑物品或项目组的公平概念。正式地,通常通过在随机排名的空间中最大化凹面目标函数来获得此类建议。当将项目的总曝光定义为其对用户的曝光率之和时,每个用户的最佳排名都会耦合,这使优化过程具有挑战性。找到这些排名的现有方法要么在批处理设置中解决全局优化问题,即一次为所有用户解决,这使它们在大规模上不适用,要么基于具有较弱理论保证的启发式方法。在本文中,我们提出了第一个有效的在线算法,以优化适用于每个凹面和平稳目标功能的排名空间中的凹面目标功能,例如为公平暴露而发现的凹入目标。基于Frank-Wolfe算法的在线变体,我们表明我们的算法在计算上很快,并在计算成本上以排序操作,内存效率为主导,并且具有强大的理论保证。与仅最大化用户端性能的基线策略相比,我们的算法允许将曝光标准的复杂公平性纳入具有可忽略的计算开销的建议中。
As recommender systems become increasingly central for sorting and prioritizing the content available online, they have a growing impact on the opportunities or revenue of their items producers. For instance, they influence which recruiter a resume is recommended to, or to whom and how much a music track, video or news article is being exposed. This calls for recommendation approaches that not only maximize (a proxy of) user satisfaction, but also consider some notion of fairness in the exposure of items or groups of items. Formally, such recommendations are usually obtained by maximizing a concave objective function in the space of randomized rankings. When the total exposure of an item is defined as the sum of its exposure over users, the optimal rankings of every users become coupled, which makes the optimization process challenging. Existing approaches to find these rankings either solve the global optimization problem in a batch setting, i.e., for all users at once, which makes them inapplicable at scale, or are based on heuristics that have weak theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we propose the first efficient online algorithm to optimize concave objective functions in the space of rankings which applies to every concave and smooth objective function, such as the ones found for fairness of exposure. Based on online variants of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, we show that our algorithm is computationally fast, generating rankings on-the-fly with computation cost dominated by the sort operation, memory efficient, and has strong theoretical guarantees. Compared to baseline policies that only maximize user-side performance, our algorithm allows to incorporate complex fairness of exposure criteria in the recommendations with negligible computational overhead.