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Research
Promoting Two-sided Fairness with Adaptive Weights for Providers and Customers in Recommendation
Lanling Xu (Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China), Zihan Lin (School of Information, Renmin University of China), Jinpeng Wang (Meituan Group, Beijing), Sheng Chen (Meituan Group, Beijing), Wayne Xin Zhao (Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China) and Ji-Rong Wen (Renmin University of China)
Abstract
At present, most recommender systems involve two stakeholders, providers and customers. Apart from maximizing the recommendation accuracy, the fairness issue for both sides should also be considered. However, there is a trade-off for multi-objective optimization problems, where optimizing one objective (e.g. provider-side fairness) may degrade the performance of others (e.g. accuracy). Most of previous studies try to improve two-sided fairness with post-processing algorithms or fairness-aware loss constraints, which are highly dependent on the heuristic adjustments without respect to the optimization goal of accuracy. In contrast, we propose a novel training framework, adaptive weighting towards two-sided fairness-aware recommendation (named Ada2Fair), which lies in the extension of the accuracy-focused objective to a controllable preference learning loss over the interaction data. Specifically, we adjust the optimization scale of an interaction sample with an adaptive weight generator, and estimate the two-sided fairness-aware weights within model training. During the training process, the recommender is trained with two-sided fairness-aware weights to boost the utility of niche providers and inactive customers in a unified way. Extensive experiments on three public datasets verify the effectiveness of Ada2Fair, which can achieve Pareto improvements in two-sided fairness-aware recommendation. Our code implementation is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Ada2Fair.