用户状态表示对推荐系统表现影响巨大,远超算法本身。
The Bandit's Blind Spot: The Critical Role of User State Representation in Recommender Systems

- 用矩阵分解生成用户状态嵌入,替代传统历史记录
- 不同状态表示使推荐效果提升超过更换算法本身
- 需针对场景定制状态构建策略,无通用最优解
随着在线信息日益丰富,推荐系统成为众多网络服务的关键工具。由于推荐环境具有持续性,系统越来越多地依赖上下文多臂赌博机(CMAB)实现个性化实时推荐。然而,用户状态表示这一关键却未被充分研究的组件——通常包含用户交互历史,与模型决策和学习密切相关——仍存在显著空白。本文研究基于矩阵分解模型生成的不同嵌入式状态表示对传统CMAB算法性能的影响。大规模实验表明,状态表示的变化带来的性能提升,甚至超过更换带算法本身的效果。此外,没有一种嵌入或聚合策略在所有数据集上始终领先,凸显了领域特定评估的必要性。这些结果揭示了文献中的重要缺口,强调推进基于赌博机的推荐系统需从嵌入质量与状态构建入手,而非仅关注算法创新。实验代码已公开于 https://github.com/UFSCar-LaSID/bandits_blind_spot。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
With the increasing availability of online information, recommender systems have become an important tool for many web-based systems. Due to the continuous aspect of recommendation environments, these systems increasingly rely on contextual multi-armed bandits (CMAB) to deliver personalized and real-time suggestions. A critical yet underexplored component in these systems is the representation of user state, which typically encapsulates the user's interaction history and is deeply correlated with the model's decisions and learning. In this paper, we investigate the impact of different embedding-based state representations derived from matrix factorization models on the performance of traditional CMAB algorithms. Our large-scale experiments reveal that variations in state representation can lead to improvements greater than those achieved by changing the bandit algorithm itself. Furthermore, no single embedding or aggregation strategy consistently dominates across datasets, underscoring the need for domain-specific evaluation. These results expose a substantial gap in the literature and emphasize that advancing bandit-based recommender systems requires a holistic approach that prioritizes embedding quality and state construction alongside algorithmic innovation. The source code for our experiments is publicly available on https://github.com/UFSCar-LaSID/bandits_blind_spot.
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