arXiv:2506.04525cs.GTcs.CY2025-06被引 1

用户集体互动可反向提升被压制内容推荐,且双赢。

Can Users Fix Algorithms? A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Collective Content Amplification in Recommender Systems

  • 构建用户与推荐系统博弈模型,分析集体互动机制。
  • 实证显示集体互动使推荐质量提升,用户福利显著增加。
  • 适合关注算法公平性与用户行为的从业者和研究者。

基于推荐系统的社交媒体平台(如TikTok、X、YouTube)中,用户为影响未来推荐,会战略性地与内容互动。已有记录显示,用户形成大规模自发运动,鼓励他人主动互动被算法压制的内容,以反向‘抬升’其推荐。然而,该现象缺乏理论分析。本文建立用户与推荐系统(RecSys)的博弈模型,用户根据个人兴趣或集体策略互动内容,而系统仅能基于偏好学习提供近似最优推荐。研究对比了个人兴趣互动与集体有意互动对推荐效果与社会福利的影响。在特定条件下,集体互动可实现帕累托改进,并严格提升用户社会福利,同时提出一种稳健算法寻找有效集体策略。有趣的是,尽管这些策略是算法抗议,但在常见推荐效用函数下,其也提升了系统自身效用。理论分析结合了GoodReads数据集上的集体策略实验及在线问卷调查,揭示了平台算法如何激励用户集体行动,以及这种集体化对平台的影响。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Users of social media platforms based on recommendation systems (e.g. TikTok, X, YouTube) strategically interact with platform content to influence future recommendations. On some such platforms, users have been documented to form large-scale grassroots movements encouraging others to purposefully interact with algorithmically suppressed content in order to counteractively ``boost'' its recommendation. However, despite widespread documentation of this phenomenon, there is little theoretical work analyzing its impact on the platform or users themselves. We study a game between users and a RecSys, where users (potentially strategically) interact with the content available to them, and the RecSys -- limited by preference learning ability -- provides each user her approximately most-preferred item. We compare recommendations and social welfare when users interact with content according to their personal interests and when a collective of users intentionally interacts with an otherwise suppressed item. We provide sufficient conditions to ensure a pareto improvement in recommendations and strict increases in user social welfare under collective interaction, and provide a robust algorithm to find an effective collective strategy. Interestingly, despite the intended algorithmic protest of these movements, we show that for commonly assumed recommender utility functions, effective collective strategies also improve the utility of the RecSys. Our theoretical analysis is complemented by empirical results of effective collective interaction strategies on the GoodReads dataset and an online survey on how real-world users attempt to influence others' recommendations on RecSys platforms. Our findings examine how and when platforms' recommendation algorithms may incentivize users to collectivize and interact with content in algorithmic protest as well as what this collectivization means for the platform.

推荐系统用户行为算法抗议

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