让新闻推荐可配置民主价值,控制信息多样性。
Democratizing News Recommenders: Modeling Multiple Perspectives for News Candidate Generation with VQ-VAE
- 用向量量化自编码器建模新闻多维度视角
- 通过调节查询向量实现推荐多样性可控
- 适合关注信息公平与多元观点的系统设计者
新闻推荐系统影响用户阅读内容及所接触的观点,其设计隐含价值取向,可能排除边缘声音或偏袒特定立场,违背民主目标。现有方法缺乏显式控制机制。本文提出面向民主目标的候选生成方法A2CG,通过向量量化变分自编码器(VQ-VAE)编码用户兴趣,并用解码器模型预测用户可能感兴趣的新闻维度(情感、政治倾向、话题、媒体框架)。在检索阶段,通过选择性翻转预测查询中的维度,动态注入多样性,实现对个性化与民主对齐之间权衡的连续调节。实验表明,该方法能生成新颖、多样且意外的候选新闻,且无需重训练即可灵活调整推荐策略,核心优势在于可配置性和规范性表达能力,而非单纯性能提升。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
News Recommender Systems (NRS) shape what users read, whose perspectives they encounter, and influence public discourse. Yet their design is value-laden: intentionally or not, NRS can embed undesired values in recommendation procedures, such as excluding underrepresented voices or favoring certain viewpoints, which may conflict with democratic goals. Existing solutions also lack mechanisms to explicitly control these values. Therefore, we introduce an approach that parameterizes NRS to support different democratic goals. We propose Aspect-Aware Candidate Generation (A2CG), a normatively configurable procedure for the candidate generation stage of NRS that allows designers to shape diversity in recommendations. Unlike prior work that only re-ranks candidates, A2CG introduces diversity at the start of the recommendation pipeline. A2CG represents articles along multiple diversity aspects: sentiment, political leaning, topic, and media framing. User interests are encoded using a Vector Quantized VAE, while a decoder-only model predicts the next article aspects users are likely to engage with. To broaden exposure to perspectives, A2CG injects diversity during retrieval by selectively flipping aspects in the predicted query, allowing candidate diversity to be tuned toward specific democratic models. Our method enables normative configurations that existing NRS cannot express. Unlike baselines with fixed structural biases, A2CG supports continuous calibration between democratic ideals without retraining. Empirically, A2CG generates novel, diverse, and serendipitous candidates while providing explicit parameter-driven control over the trade-off between personalization and democratic alignment. Rather than aiming for pointwise superiority, A2CG's main contribution lies in its controllability and ability to express flexible normative configurations.
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