invited talk by Craig Boutilier (Google Research): Reinforcement Learning in Recommender Systems: Some Challenges

Abstract: I'll present a brief overview of some recent work on reinforcement learning motivated by practical issues that arise in the application of RL to online, user-facing applications like recommender systems. These include stochastic action sets, long-term cumulative effects, and combinatorial action spaces. I'll provide some detail on the last of these, describing SlateQ, a novel decomposition technique that allows value-based RL (e.g., Q-learning) in slate-based recommender to scale to commercial production systems, and briefly describe both small-scale simulation and a large-scale experiment with YouTube.

Bio: Craig is Principal Scientist at Google, working on various aspects of decision making under uncertainty (e.g., reinforcement learning, Markov decision processes, user modeling, preference modeling and elicitation) and recommender systems. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1992, and has held positions at the University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, CombineNet, and co-founded Granata Decision Systems.

Craig was Editor-in-Chief of JAIR; Associate Editor with ACM TEAC, JAIR, JMLR, and JAAMAS; Program Chair for IJCAI-09 and UAI-2000. Boutilier is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He was recipient of the 2018 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award and a Tier I Canada Research Chair; and has received (with great co-authors) a number of Best Paper awards including: the 2009 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize; the 2014 AIJ Prominent Paper Award; and the 2018 NeurIPS Best Paper Award.