新动作出现时,仍能有效选择并学习,提升推荐系统适应性
Offline Contextual Bandits in the Presence of New Actions

- 用动作特征构建梯度估计器,捕捉特征间交互作用
- 新动作选择成功率提升,整体策略性能不下降
- 适合动态内容场景,如新闻、视频推荐系统
自动化决策算法广泛应用于推荐系统与搜索引擎。传统离线策略学习(OPL)仅从已有动作集中优化,但现实中动作(如新闻、视频)持续更新,数据收集后动作空间已变化。本文将部署后引入的动作称为新动作,提出一种融合动作特征的新方法。提出局部组合伪逆(LCPI)梯度估计器,平衡奖励建模与数据采集对特征的条件依赖,捕捉特征维度间的交互。进一步设计通用算法PONA,结合专精于新动作选择的LCPI与擅长现有动作学习的双重稳健(DR)估计器,通过加权融合实现对新旧动作的统一优化,并可调节新动作选择比例。大量实验表明,相比多数无法选择新动作的方法,PONA能高效识别新动作且保持整体策略性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Automated decision-making algorithms drive applications such as recommendation systems and search engines. These algorithms often rely on off-policy contextual bandits or off-policy learning (OPL). Conventionally, OPL selects actions that maximize the expected reward from an existing action set. However, in many real-world scenarios, actions, such as news articles or video content, change continuously, and the action space evolves over time after data collection. We define actions introduced after deploying the logging policy as new actions and focus on OPL with new actions. Existing OPL methods identify optimal actions from the existing set effectively but cannot learn and select new actions because no relevant data are logged. To address this limitation, we propose a new OPL method that leverages action features. We first introduce the Local Combination PseudoInverse (LCPI) estimator for the policy gradient, generalizing the PseudoInverse estimator initially proposed for off-policy evaluation of slate bandits. LCPI controls the trade-off between reward-modeling condition and the condition for data collection regarding the action features, capturing the interaction effects among different dimensions of action features. Furthermore, we propose a generalized algorithm called Policy Optimization for Effective New Actions (PONA), which integrates LCPI, a component specialized for new action selection, with Doubly Robust (DR), which excels at learning within existing actions. We define PONA as a weighted sum of the LCPI and DR estimators, optimizing both the selection of existing and new actions, and allowing the proportion of new action selections to be adjusted by the weight parameter. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that PONA efficiently selects new actions while maintaining the overall policy performance as opposed to most existing methods that cannot select new actions.
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