2021/12/21 by Kailun Wu, Wu, Kailun, Zhangming Chan +13
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · #Advanced Bandit Algorithms Research #Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning and Data Classification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.11136
openalex publication_date 2021/12/21 · openalex created_date 2022/11/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Exploration-Exploitation (E&E) algorithms are commonly adopted to deal with the feedback-loop issue in large-scale online recommender systems. Most of existing studies believe that high uncertainty can be a good indicator of potential reward, and thus primarily focus on the estimation of model uncertainty. We argue that such an approach overlooks the subsequent effect of exploration on model training. From the perspective of online learning, the adoption of an exploration strategy would also affect the collecting of training data, which further influences model learning. To understand the interaction between exploration and training, we design a Pseudo-Exploration module that simulates the model updating process after a certain item is explored and the corresponding feedback is received. We further show that such a process is equivalent to adding an adversarial perturbation to the model input, and thereby name our proposed approach as an the Adversarial Gradient Driven Exploration (AGE). For production deployment, we propose a dynamic gating unit to pre-determine the utility of an exploration. This enables us to utilize the limited amount of resources for exploration, and avoid wasting pageview resources on ineffective exploration. The effectiveness of AGE was firstly examined through an extensive number of ablation studies on an academic dataset. Meanwhile, AGE has also been deployed to one of the world-leading display advertising platforms, and we observe significant improvements on various top-line evaluation metrics.