Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of
information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The
vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation
procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed
strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the
capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions
with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a
recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage
Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via
recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items
from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent
interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model
parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the
importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users
and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed
framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on
a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
framework.

本文提出一种通过模型驱动的增强学习方法来不断优化推荐策略的推荐系统，将用户与推荐系统之间的交互建模为马尔可夫决策过程，并通过在线用户 - 代理交互环境模拟器来预训练和评估模型参数，进一步提出了一种将列表式推荐纳入推荐系统的实验方法，并在真实世界的电子商务数据集上验证了该方法的有效性。