Deep recommender systems have become increasingly popular in recent years, and have been utilized in a variety of domains, including movies, music, books, search queries, and social networks. They assist users in their information-seeking tasks by suggesting items (products, services, or information) that best fit their needs and preferences. Most existing recommender systems are based on static recommendation policies and hand-crafted architectures. Specifically, (i) most recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process, which may fail given the dynamic nature of the users' preferences; (ii) existing recommendation policies aim to maximize the immediate reward from users, while completely overlooking their long-term impacts on user experience; (iii) designing architectures manually requires ample expert knowledge, non-trivial time and engineering efforts, while sometimes human error and bias can lead to suboptimal architectures. I will introduce my efforts in tackling these challenges via reinforcement learning (RL) and automated machine learning (AutoML), which can (i) adaptively update the recommendation policies, (ii) optimize the long-term user experience, and (iii) automatically design the deep architectures for recommender systems. 

Speaker: Mr Xiangyu ZHAO
Date: 26 February 2021 (Fri)
Time: 10:00am – 11:00am
Poster: Click here