论文标题

点击可能是作弊:针对点击诱饵问题的反事实建议

Clicks can be Cheating: Counterfactual Recommendation for Mitigating Clickbait Issue

论文作者

Wang, Wenjie, Feng, Fuli, He, Xiangnan, Zhang, Hanwang, Chua, Tat-Seng

论文摘要

建议是信息系统中普遍且至关重要的服务。为了向用户提供个性化的建议,行业参与者更具体地说,是基于点击行为数据建立预测模型的。这被称为点击率(CTR)预测,该预测已成为建立个性化推荐服务的黄金标准。但是,我们认为点击和用户满意度之间存在很大的差距 - 通常,用户被“作弊”以通过该项目的有吸引力的标题/封面点击项目。如果用户发现单击项目的实际内容令人失望,这将严重损害用户对系统的信任。更糟糕的是,在此类缺陷的数据上优化CTR模型将导致Matthew效应,从而使看起来很有吸引力,但实际上更频繁地推荐了低质量的项目。 在本文中,我们将推荐模型提出为因果图,以反映推荐的原因效应因素,并通过对因果图进行反事实推断来解决Clickbait问题。我们想象一个反事实世界,每个项目都具有曝光功能(即用户在单击决定之前可以看到的功能)。通过估计用户在反事实世界中的点击可能性,我们能够减少曝光功能的直接影响并消除点击诱饵问题。现实世界数据集的实验表明,我们的方法显着提高了点击后CTR模型的满意度。

Recommendation is a prevalent and critical service in information systems. To provide personalized suggestions to users, industry players embrace machine learning, more specifically, building predictive models based on the click behavior data. This is known as the Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, which has become the gold standard for building personalized recommendation service. However, we argue that there is a significant gap between clicks and user satisfaction -- it is common that a user is "cheated" to click an item by the attractive title/cover of the item. This will severely hurt user's trust on the system if the user finds the actual content of the clicked item disappointing. What's even worse, optimizing CTR models on such flawed data will result in the Matthew Effect, making the seemingly attractive but actually low-quality items be more frequently recommended. In this paper, we formulate the recommendation models as a causal graph that reflects the cause-effect factors in recommendation, and address the clickbait issue by performing counterfactual inference on the causal graph. We imagine a counterfactual world where each item has only exposure features (i.e., the features that the user can see before making a click decision). By estimating the click likelihood of a user in the counterfactual world, we are able to reduce the direct effect of exposure features and eliminate the clickbait issue. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves the post-click satisfaction of CTR models.

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