# Whole-Chain Recommendations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03987 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03987/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Feb 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Model-free Reinforcement Learning with Stochastic Reward Stabilization for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13246/) (2023)
- [SINGA-Easy: An Easy-to-Use Framework for MultiModal Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02572/) (2021)
- [VisualTextRank: Unsupervised Graph-based Content Extraction for Automating Ad Text to Image Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02725/) (2021)
- [Text is NOT Enough: Integrating Visual Impressions into Open-domain Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05778/) (2021)
- [Discovering Personalized Semantics for Soft Attributes in Recommender Systems using Concept Activation Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02830/) (2022)
- [Reinforced MOOCs Concept Recommendation in Heterogeneous Information Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11011/) (2022)
- [Explanation-Guided Fairness Testing through Genetic Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08335/) (2022)
- [Using Graph Neural Networks for Program Termination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14648/) (2022)
- [Tribe or Not? Critical Inspection of Group Differences Using TribalGram](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09664/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in developing RL-based recommender systems. In practical recommendation sessions, users will sequentially access multiple scenarios, such as the entrance pages and the item detail pages, and each scenario has its specific characteristics. However, the majority of existing RL-based recommender systems focus on optimizing one strategy for all scenarios or separately optimizing each strategy, which could lead to sub-optimal overall performance. In this paper, we study the recommendation problem with multiple (consecutive) scenarios, i.e., whole-chain recommendations. We propose a multi-agent RL-based approach (DeepChain), which can capture the sequential correlation among different scenarios and jointly optimize multiple recommendation strategies. To be specific, all recommender agents (RAs) share the same memory of users' historical behaviors, and they work collaboratively to maximize the overall reward of a session. Note that optimizing multiple recommendation strategies jointly faces two challenges in the existing model-free RL model - (i) it requires huge amounts of user behavior data, and (ii) the distribution of reward (users' feedback) are extremely unbalanced. In this paper, we introduce model-based RL techniques to reduce the training data requirement and execute more accurate strategy updates. The experimental results based on a real e-commerce platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.