Improving ranking function and diversification in interactive recommendation systems based on deep reinforcement learning

Abstract

Recently, interactive recommendation systems based on reinforcement learning have been attended by researchers due to the consider recommendation procedure as a dynamic process and update the recommendation model based on immediate user feedback, which is neglected in traditional methods. The existing works have two significant drawbacks. Firstly, inefficient ranking function to produce the Top-N recommendation list. Secondly, focusing on recommendation accuracy and inattention to other evaluation metrics such as diversity. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning based recommendation system by utilizing Actor-Critic architecture to model dynamic users' interaction with the recommender agent and maximize the expected longterm reward. Furthermore, we propose utilizing Spotify's ANNoy algorithm to find the most similar items to generated action by actor-network. After that, the Total Diversity Effect Ranking algorithm is used to generate the recommendation items concerning relevancy and diversity. Moreover, we apply positional encoding to compute representations of the user's interaction sequence without using sequence-aligned recurrent neural networks. Extensive experiments on the MovieLens dataset demonstrate that our proposed model is able to generate a diverse while relevance recommendation list based on the user's preferences.