arXiv:2604.16419cs.IRcs.AI2026-04

探索过多反而降低体验,推荐系统该按用户调整新颖性推送强度。

Modeling User Exploration Saturation: When Recommender Systems Should Stop Pushing Novelty

  • 发现用户对新颖内容的接受度存在饱和点,超限推送反伤体验。
  • 数据表明长尾内容推荐在用户互动少时更易过载,效果递减。
  • 建议个性化调节公平性推送强度,避免一刀切伤害特定用户。

公平性推荐系统常通过提升曝光来缓解偏见,但现有方法多采用全局超参数或固定权重控制探索程度,隐含假设所有用户应承受相同探索强度。本文研究用户层面的探索饱和现象——即继续增加探索不再提升用户体验,甚至降低参与度与相关性感知。基于MovieLens-1M与Last.fm的纵向实验显示,公平驱动的探索带来边际收益递减或非单调变化,且个体差异显著;互动历史较短的用户更早达到饱和,说明统一的公平性压力可能不公平地影响部分用户。结果揭示了公平性与用户体验间的权衡,主张推荐系统应根据用户个体状态动态调节公平性探索强度。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Fairness-aware recommender systems often mitigate bias by increasing exposure to under-represented or long-tail content, commonly through mechanisms that promote novelty and diversity. In practice, the strength of such interventions is typically controlled using global hyperparameters, fixed regularization weights, heuristic caps, or offline tuning strategies. These approaches implicitly assume that a single level of exploration is appropriate across users, contexts, and stages of interaction. In this work, we study exploration saturation as a user-dependent phenomenon arising from fairness- and novelty-driven recommendation strategies. We define exploration saturation as the point at which further increases in exploration no longer improve user utility and may instead reduce engagement or perceived relevance. Rather than proposing a new fairness-aware algorithm or optimizing a specific objective, we empirically analyze how increasing exploration affects users across varied recommendation models. Through longitudinal experiments using MovieLens-1M and Last.fm datasets, our results indicate that fairness-induced exploration exhibits diminishing or non-monotonic returns and varies substantially across users. In particular, users with limited interaction histories tend to reach saturation earlier, suggesting that uniform fairness or novelty pressure can disproportionately disadvantage certain users. These findings reveal a trade-off between fairness and user experience, suggesting that recommendation systems should adapt not only to relevance but also to the amount of fairness-driven exploration applied to individual users.

推荐系统公平性用户行为

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