Balancing Accuracy and Fairness for Interactive Recommendation with Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces FairRec, a reinforcement learning framework that dynamically balances accuracy and fairness in interactive recommender systems, addressing the limitations of static fairness methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel RL-based approach, FairRec, for maintaining long-term fairness and accuracy balance in IRS, considering evolving user preferences and fairness status.

Findings

FairRec improves fairness in recommendations.

FairRec maintains high recommendation accuracy.

Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of FairRec.

Abstract

Fairness in recommendation has attracted increasing attention due to bias and discrimination possibly caused by traditional recommenders. In Interactive Recommender Systems (IRS), user preferences and the system's fairness status are constantly changing over time. Existing fairness-aware recommenders mainly consider fairness in static settings. Directly applying existing methods to IRS will result in poor recommendation. To resolve this problem, we propose a reinforcement learning based framework, FairRec, to dynamically maintain a long-term balance between accuracy and fairness in IRS. User preferences and the system's fairness status are jointly compressed into the state representation to generate recommendations. FairRec aims at maximizing our designed cumulative reward that combines accuracy and fairness. Extensive experiments validate that FairRec can improve fairness, while preserving good recommendation quality.