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Poster
Reward Constrained Interactive Recommendation with Natural Language Feedback
Ruiyi Zhang · Tong Yu · Yilin Shen · Hongxia Jin · Changyou Chen

Tue Dec 10 10:45 AM -- 12:45 PM (PST) @ East Exhibition Hall B + C #97
in Applications -- Recommender Systems »

Text-based interactive recommendation provides richer user feedback and has demonstrated advantages over traditional interactive recommender systems. However, recommendations can easily violate preferences of users from their past natural-language feedback, since the recommender needs to explore new items for further improvement. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel constraint-augmented reinforcement learning (RL) framework to efficiently incorporate user preferences over time. Specifically, we leverage a discriminator to detect recommendations violating user historical preference, which is incorporated into the standard RL objective of maximizing expected cumulative future rewards. Our proposed framework is general and is further extended to the task of constrained text generation. Empirical results show that the proposed method yields consistent improvement relative to standard RL methods.

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning and Planning -> Reinforcement Learning · Applications -> Natural Language Processing

Author Information

Ruiyi Zhang (Duke University)

I am currently a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Department of Computer Science, Duke University. My research interest is Deep Learning.

Tong Yu (Samsung Research America)
Yilin Shen (Samsung Research America)
Hongxia Jin (Samsung Research America)
Changyou Chen (University at Buffalo)

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