Advances in Recommender Systems: From Multi-stakeholder Marketplaces to Automated RecSys

The tutorial focuses on two major themes of recent advances in recommender systems: Part A: Recommendations in a Marketplace: Multi-sided marketplaces are steadily emerging as valuable ecosystems in many applications (e.g. Amazon, AirBnb, Uber), wherein the platforms have customers not only on the demand side (e.g. users), but also on the supply side (e.g. retailer). This tutorial focuses on designing search & recommendation frameworks that power such multi-stakeholder platforms. We discuss multi-objective ranking/recommendation techniques, discuss different ways in which stakeholders specify their objectives, highlight user specific characteristics (e.g. user receptivity) which could be leveraged when developing joint optimization modules and finally present a number of real world case-studies of such multi-stakeholder platforms.

Part B: Automated Recommendation System: As the recommendation tasks are getting more diverse and the recommending models are growing more complicated, it is increasingly challenging to develop a proper recommendation system that can adapt well to a new recommendation task. In this tutorial, we focus on how automated machine learning (AutoML) techniques can benefit the design and usage of recommendation systems. Specifically, we start from a full scope describing what can be automated for recommendation systems. Then, we elaborate more on three important topics under such a scope, i.e., feature engineering, hyperparameter optimization/neural architecture search, and algorithm selection. The core issues and recent works under these topics will be introduced, summarized, and discussed. Finally, we finalize the tutorial with conclusions and some future directions.