Personalized Approximate Pareto-Efficient Recommendation

Real-world recommendation systems usually have different learning objectives and evaluation criteria on accuracy, diversity or novelty. Therefore, multi-objective recommendation (MOR) has been widely explored to jointly model different objectives. Pareto efficiency, where no objective can be further improved without hurting others, is viewed as an optimal situation in multi-objective optimization. Recently, Pareto efficiency model has been introduced to MOR, while all existing scalarization methods only have shared objective weights for all instances. To capture users’ objective-level preferences and enhance personalization in Pareto-efficient recommendation, we propose a novel Personalized Approximate Pareto-Efficient Recommendation (PAPERec) framework for multi-objective recommendation. Specifically, we design an approximate Pareto-efficient learning based on scalarization with KKT conditions that closely mimics Pareto efficiency, where users have personalized weights on different objectives. We propose a Pareto-oriented reinforcement learning module to find appropriate personalized objective weights for each user, with the weighted sum of multiple objectives’ gradients considered in reward. In experiments, we conduct extensive offline and online evaluations on a real-world recommendation system. The significant improvements verify the effectiveness of PAPERec in practice. We have deployed PAPERec on WeChat Top Stories, affecting millions of users. The source codes are released in https://github.com/onepunch-cyber/PAPERec.