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A Reinforcement Learning Based Recommender System Framework for Web Apps: Radio and Game Aggregators Scenarios

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Progress in Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2024)

Abstract

Recommendation systems can play an important role in today’s digital content platforms by supporting the suggestion of relevant content in a personalised manner for each customer. Such content customisation has not been consistent across most media domains, and particularly on radio streaming and gaming aggregators, which are the two real-world application domains focused in this work. The challenges faced in these application areas are the dynamic nature of user preferences and the difficulty of generating recommendations for less popular content, due to the overwhelming choice and polarisation of available top content. We present the design and implementation of a Reinforcement Learning-based Recommendation System (RLRS) for web applications, using a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) agent and, as a reward function, a weighted sum of the user Click Distribution (CD) across the recommended items and the Dwell Time (DT), a measure of the time users spend interacting with those items. Our system has been deployed in real production scenarios with preliminary but promising results. Several metrics are used to track the effectiveness of our approach, such as content coverage, category diversity, and intra-list similarity. In both scenarios tested, the system shows consistent improvement and adaptability over time, reinforcing its applicability.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by: Base Funding - UIDB/00027/2020 and Programmatic Funding - UIDP/00027/2020 of the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory - LIACC - funded by national funds through the FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC).

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Correspondence to Pedro Sobral .

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Batista, A., Torres, J.M., Sobral, P., Moreira, R.S., Soares, C., Pereira, I. (2025). A Reinforcement Learning Based Recommender System Framework for Web Apps: Radio and Game Aggregators Scenarios. In: Santos, M.F., Machado, J., Novais, P., Cortez, P., Moreira, P.M. (eds) Progress in Artificial Intelligence. EPIA 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14967. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73497-7_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73497-7_34

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-73496-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-73497-7

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