Designing Explanations for Group Recommender Systems
Institute of Software Technology Graz University of Technology（格拉茨工业大学软件技术研究所）；Web Information Systems TU Delft（代尔夫特理工大学网络信息系统系）
A. Felfernig, N. Tintarev, T. N. T. Trang, M. Stettinger
备注：
Cite as: A. Felfernig, N. Tintarev, T.N.T. Trang, and M. Stettinger. Explanations for Groups. In A. Felfernig, L. Boratto, M. Stettinger, and M. Tkalcic (Eds.), Group Recommender Systems: An Introduction (pp. 105-126). SpringerBriefs in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Springer, 2018
Explanations are used in recommender systems for various reasons. Users have to be supported in making (high-quality) decisions more quickly. Developers of recommender systems want to convince users to purchase specific items. Users should better understand how the recommender system works and why a specific item has been recommended. Users should also develop a more in-depth understanding of the item domain. Consequently, explanations are designed in order to achieve specific \emph{goals} such as increasing the transparency of a recommendation or increasing a user's trust in the recommender system. In this paper, we provide an overview of existing research related to explanations in recommender systems, and specifically discuss aspects relevant to group recommendation scenarios. In this context, we present different ways of explaining and visualizing recommendations determined on the basis of preference aggregation strategies.
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)（南里奥格兰德联邦大学）；TU Dortmund（多特蒙德工业大学）
With the recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence, an increasing number of decision-making tasks are delegated to software systems. A key requirement for the success and adoption of such systems is that users must trust system choices or even fully automated decisions. To achieve this, explanation facilities have been widely investigated as a means of establishing trust in these systems since the early years of expert systems. With today's increasingly sophisticated machine learning algorithms, new challenges in the context of explanations, accountability, and trust towards such…
Modern recommender systems face an increasing need to explain their recommendations. Despite considerable progress in this area, evaluating the quality of explanations remains a significant challenge for researchers and practitioners. Prior work mainly conducts human study to evaluate explanation quality, which is usually expensive, time-consuming, and prone to human bias. In this paper, we propose an offline evaluation method that can be computed without human involvement. To evaluate an explanation, our method quantifies its counterfactual impact on the recommendation. To validate the effect…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）
As recommender systems become increasingly sophisticated and complex, they often suffer from lack of fairness and transparency. Providing robust and unbiased explanations for recommendations has been drawing more and more attention as it can help address these issues and improve trustworthiness and informativeness of recommender systems. However, despite the fact that such explanations are generated for humans who respond more strongly to messages with appropriate emotions, there is a lack of consideration for emotions when generating explanations for recommendations. Current explanation gener…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Blendle Research（Blendle研究院）
There is an increasing demand for algorithms to explain their outcomes. So far, there is no method that explains the rankings produced by a ranking algorithm. To address this gap we propose LISTEN, a LISTwise ExplaiNer, to explain rankings produced by a ranking algorithm. To efficiently use LISTEN in production, we train a neural network to learn the underlying explanation space created by LISTEN; we call this model Q-LISTEN. We show that LISTEN produces faithful explanations and that Q-LISTEN is able to learn these explanations. Moreover, we show that LISTEN is safe to use in a real world env…
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；École Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）
Interpretable explanations for recommender systems and other machine learning models are crucial to gain user trust. Prior works that have focused on paths connecting users and items in a heterogeneous network have several limitations, such as discovering relationships rather than true explanations, or disregarding other users' privacy. In this work, we take a fresh perspective, and present PRINCE: a provider-side mechanism to produce tangible explanations for end-users, where an explanation is defined to be a set of minimal actions performed by the user that, if removed, changes the recommend…
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Recent studies have shown that providing personalized explanations alongside recommendations increases trust and perceived quality. Furthermore, it gives users an opportunity to refine the recommendations by critiquing parts of the explanations. On one hand, current recommender systems model the recommendation, explanation, and critiquing objectives jointly, but this creates an inherent trade-off between their respective performance. On the other hand, although recent latent linear critiquing approaches are built upon an existing recommender system, they suffer from computational inefficiency …
From latent factors to language: a user study on LLM-generated explanations for an inherently interpretable matrix-based recommender system
Department of Technological Innovation Management, Faculty of Engineering, University of Mons (UMONS), Mons, Belgium（蒙斯大学工程学院技术创新管理系）；Department of Mathematics and Operational Research, Faculty of Engineering, University of Mons (UMONS), Mons, Belgium（蒙斯大学工程学院数学与运筹学系）；Department of Mathematics（数学系）；Operational Research, Faculty of Engineering, University of Mons (UMONS), Mons, Belgium（运筹学系）
A few Recommender Systems (RS) resort to explanations so as to enhance trust in recommendations. However, current techniques for explanation generation tend to strongly uphold the recommended products instead of presenting both reasons for and reasons against them. We argue that an RS can better enhance overall trust and transparency by frankly displaying both kinds of reasons to users.We have developed such an RS by exploiting knowledge graphs and by applying Snedegar's theory of practical reasoning. We show that our implemented RS has excellent performance and we report on an experiment with…
Though recommender systems are defined by personalization, recent work has shown the importance of additional, beyond-accuracy objectives, such as fairness. Because users often expect their recommendations to be purely personalized, these new algorithmic objectives must be communicated transparently in a fairness-aware recommender system. While explanation has a long history in recommender systems research, there has been little work that attempts to explain systems that use a fairness objective. Even though the previous work in other branches of AI has explored the use of explanations as a to…
Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Weizmann Institute of Science（魏茨曼科学研究所）
Automated platforms which support users in finding a mutually beneficial match, such as online dating and job recruitment sites, are becoming increasingly popular. These platforms often include recommender systems that assist users in finding a suitable match. While recommender systems which provide explanations for their recommendations have shown many benefits, explanation methods have yet to be adapted and tested in recommending suitable matches. In this paper, we introduce and extensively evaluate the use of "reciprocal explanations" -- explanations which provide reasoning as to why both p…
Insight Centre for Data Analytics（洞察数据分析中心）；University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）
An important task for a recommender system to provide interpretable explanations for the user. This is important for the credibility of the system. Current interpretable recommender systems tend to focus on certain features known to be important to the user and offer their explanations in a structured form. It is well known that user generated reviews and feedback from reviewers have strong leverage over the users' decisions. On the other hand, recent text generation works have been shown to generate text of similar quality to human written text, and we aim to show that generated text can be s…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
State-of-the-art recommender systems have the ability to generate high-quality recommendations, but usually cannot provide intuitive explanations to humans due to the usage of black-box prediction models. The lack of transparency has highlighted the critical importance of improving the explainability of recommender systems. In this paper, we propose to extract causal rules from the user interaction history as post-hoc explanations for the black-box sequential recommendation mechanisms, whilst maintain the predictive accuracy of the recommendation model. Our approach firstly achieves counterfac…
The Diversity Paradox revisited: Systemic Effects of Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems
Scuola Normale Superiore and Università di Pisa（诺莱规范大学和比萨大学）；Scuola Normale Superiore（诺莱规范大学）；Sciences Po Paris（巴黎社会科学高等研究院）；Università di Pisa（比萨大学）；CNR and Scuola Normale Superiore（意大利国家研究委员会和诺莱规范大学）
Toward Holistic Evaluation of Recommender Systems Powered by Generative Models
Polytechnic University of Bari（巴里理工大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）；Bespoke Labs（Bespoke实验室）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Autónoma University of Madrid（马德里自治大学）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
The closed feedback loop in recommender systems is a common setting that can lead to different types of biases. Several studies have dealt with these biases by designing methods to mitigate their effect on the recommendations. However, most existing studies do not consider the iterative behavior of the system where the closed feedback loop plays a crucial role in incorporating different biases into several parts of the recommendation steps. We present a theoretical framework to model the asymptotic evolution of the different components of a recommender system operating within a feedback loop s…
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学香槟分校）；Instacart
With the prevalence of deep learning based embedding approaches, recommender systems have become a proven and indispensable tool in various information filtering applications. However, many of them remain difficult to diagnose what aspects of the deep models' input drive the final ranking decision, thus, they cannot often be understood by human stakeholders. In this paper, we investigate the dilemma between recommendation and explainability, and show that by utilizing the contextual features (e.g., item reviews from users), we can design a series of explainable recommender systems without sacr…
While other areas of machine learning have seen more and more automation, designing a high-performing recommender system still requires a high level of human effort. Furthermore, recent work has shown that modern recommender system algorithms do not always improve over well-tuned baselines. A natural follow-up question is, "how do we choose the right algorithm for a new dataset and performance metric?" In this work, we start by giving the first large-scale study of recommender system approaches by comparing 18 algorithms and 100 sets of hyperparameters across 85 datasets and 315 metrics. We fi…
Indian regional movie dataset is the first database of regional Indian movies, users and their ratings. It consists of movies belonging to 18 different Indian regional languages and metadata of users with varying demographics. Through this dataset, the diversity of Indian regional cinema and its huge viewership is captured. We analyze the dataset that contains roughly 10K ratings of 919 users and 2,851 movies using some supervised and unsupervised collaborative filtering techniques like Probabilistic Matrix Factorization, Matrix Completion, Blind Compressed Sensing etc. The dataset consists of…
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Explainable recommendation has shown its great advantages for improving recommendation persuasiveness, user satisfaction, system transparency, among others. A fundamental problem of explainable recommendation is how to evaluate the explanations. In the past few years, various evaluation strategies have been proposed. However, they are scattered in different papers, and there lacks a systematic and detailed comparison between them. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we comprehensively review the previous work, and provide different taxonomies for them according to the evaluation perspectives an…
Echoes in Filter Bubble: Diagnosing and Curing Popularity Bias in Generative Recommenders
Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Hong Kong Polytechnic University（数据科学与人工智能系，香港理工大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University（计算机科学与工程学院，中南大学）；National Super Computing Center, Tianjin, China（国家超算中心，天津，中国）；Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau（数据科学学院，澳门城市大学）；School of Information and Communication Technology, Griffith University（信息与通信技术学院，格里菲斯大学）
Reviews contain rich information about product characteristics and user interests and thus are commonly used to boost recommender system performance. Specifically, previous work show that jointly learning to perform review generation improves rating prediction performance. Meanwhile, these model-produced reviews serve as recommendation explanations, providing the user with insights on predicted ratings. However, while existing models could generate fluent, human-like reviews, it is unclear to what degree the reviews fully uncover the rationale behind the jointly predicted rating. In this work,…
Explaining and interpreting the decisions of recommender systems are becoming extremely relevant both, for improving predictive performance, and providing valid explanations to users. While most of the recent interest has focused on providing local explanations, there has been a much lower emphasis on studying the effects of model dynamics and its impact on explanation. In this paper, we perform a focused study on the impact of model interpretability in the context of calibration. Specifically, we address the challenges of both over-confident and under-confident predictions with interpretabili…
A Scenario-Oriented Survey of Federated Recommender Systems: Techniques, Challenges, and Future Directions
School of Software Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学软件工程学院）；City, University of London（伦敦城市大学）；Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Intelligent Networks and Network Security, the School of Information and Communication Engineering, and SMILES LAB, Xi’an Jiaotong University（教育部智能网络与网络 security key laboratory、信息与通信工程学院及SMILES实验室，西安交通大学）
In recommendation systems, the choice of loss function is critical since a good loss may significantly improve the model performance. However, manually designing a good loss is a big challenge due to the complexity of the problem. A large fraction of previous work focuses on handcrafted loss functions, which needs significant expertise and human effort. In this paper, inspired by the recent development of automated machine learning, we propose an automatic loss function generation framework, AutoLossGen, which is able to generate loss functions directly constructed from basic mathematical oper…
KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence, University of Cyprus（塞浦路斯大学KIOS卓越研究与创新中心）；Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）
Dimensionality reduction is a popular preprocessing and a widely used tool in data mining. Transparency, which is usually achieved by means of explanations, is nowadays a widely accepted and crucial requirement of machine learning based systems like classifiers and recommender systems. However, transparency of dimensionality reduction and other data mining tools have not been considered in much depth yet, still it is crucial to understand their behavior -- in particular practitioners might want to understand why a specific sample got mapped to a specific location. In order to (locally) underst…
We present CLEAR, a method for learning session-specific causal graphs, in the possible presence of latent confounders, from attention in pre-trained attention-based recommenders. These causal graphs describe user behavior, within the context captured by attention, and can provide a counterfactual explanation for a recommendation. In essence, these causal graphs allow answering "why" questions uniquely for any specific session. Using empirical evaluations we show that, compared to naively using attention weights to explain input-output relations, counterfactual explanations found by CLEAR are …
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克信息学研究所）；IIT Bhilai（印度理工学院比莱校区）
System-provided explanations for recommendations are an important component towards transparent and trustworthy AI. In state-of-the-art research, this is a one-way signal, though, to improve user acceptance. In this paper, we turn the role of explanations around and investigate how they can contribute to enhancing the quality of the generated recommendations themselves. We devise a human-in-the-loop framework, called ELIXIR, where user feedback on explanations is leveraged for pairwise learning of user preferences. ELIXIR leverages feedback on pairs of recommendations and explanations to learn…
