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Poster
Incentivized Bandit Learning with Self-Reinforcing User Preferences
Tianchen Zhou · Jia Liu · Chaosheng Dong · jingyuan deng

Wed Jul 21 09:00 PM -- 11:00 PM (PDT) @ Virtual
In this paper, we investigate a new multi-armed bandit (MAB) online learning model that considers real-world phenomena in many recommender systems: (i) the learning agent cannot pull the arms by itself and thus has to offer rewards to users to incentivize arm-pulling indirectly; and (ii) if users with specific arm preferences are well rewarded, they induce a "self-reinforcing" effect in the sense that they will attract more users of similar arm preferences. Besides addressing the tradeoff of exploration and exploitation, another key feature of this new MAB model is to balance reward and incentivizing payment. The goal of the agent is to maximize the total reward over a fixed time horizon $T$ with a low total payment. Our contributions in this paper are two-fold: (i) We propose a new MAB model with random arm selection that considers the relationship of users' self-reinforcing preferences and incentives; and (ii) We leverage the properties of a multi-color Polya urn with nonlinear feedback model to propose two MAB policies termed "At-Least-$n$ Explore-Then-Commit" and "UCB-List". We prove that both policies achieve $O(log T)$ expected regret with $O(log T)$ expected payment over a time horizon $T$. We conduct numerical simulations to demonstrate and verify the performances of these two policies and study their robustness under various settings.

Author Information

Tianchen Zhou (The Ohio State University)
Jia Liu (The Ohio State University)
Jia Liu

ia (Kevin) Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University and an Amazon Visiting Academics (AVA). He received his Ph.D. degree from the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech in 2010. From Aug. 2017 to Aug. 2020, he was an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Computer Science at Iowa State University. His research areas include theoretical machine learning, stochastic network optimization and control, and performance analysis for data analytics infrastructure and cyber-physical systems. Dr. Liu is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. He has received numerous awards at top venues, including IEEE INFOCOM'19 Best Paper Award, IEEE INFOCOM'16 Best Paper Award, IEEE INFOCOM'13 Best Paper Runner-up Award, IEEE INFOCOM'11 Best Paper Runner-up Award, IEEE ICC'08 Best Paper Award, and honors of long/spotlight presentations at ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR. He is an NSF CAREER Award recipient in 2020 and a winner of the Google Faculty Research Award in 2020. He received the LAS Award for Early Achievement in Research at Iowa State University in 2020, and the Bell Labs President Gold Award. His research is supported by NSF, AFOSR, AFRL, and ONR.

Chaosheng Dong (Amazon)
jingyuan deng (amazon)

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