Text-Based Interactive Recommendation via Offline Reinforcement Learning

No. 10: AAAI-22 Technical Tracks 10

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 36

AAAI Technical Track on Speech and Natural Language Processing

Interactive recommendation with natural-language feedback can provide richer user feedback and has demonstrated advantages over traditional recommender systems. However, the classical online paradigm involves iteratively collecting experience via interaction with users, which is expensive and risky. We consider an offline interactive recommendation to exploit arbitrary experience collected by multiple unknown policies. A direct application of policy learning with such fixed experience suffers from the distribution shift. To tackle this issue, we develop a behavior-agnostic off-policy correction framework to make offline interactive recommendation possible. Specifically, we leverage the conservative Q-function to perform off-policy evaluation, which enables learning effective policies from fixed datasets without further interactions. Empirical results on the simulator derived from real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed offline training framework.

10.1609/aaai.v36i10.21424