Pedro Fernandes

Fernando F. Granado, Davi A. Bezerra, Iuri Queiroz et al.

Food delivery platforms face the challenge of helping users navigate vast catalogs of restaurants and dishes to find meals they truly enjoy. This paper presents RED, an automated recommendation system designed for iFood, Latin America's largest on-demand food delivery platform, to personalize the selection of curated food collections displayed to millions of users. Our approach employs a LightGBM classifier that scores collections based on three feature groups: collection characteristics, user-collection similarity, and contextual information. To address the cold-start problem of recommending newly created collections, we develop content-based representations using item embeddings and implement monotonicity constraints to improve generalization. We tackle data scarcity by bootstrapping from category carousel interactions and address visibility bias through unbiased sampling of impressions and purchases in production. The system demonstrates significant real-world impact through extensive A/B testing with 5-10% of iFood's user base. Online results of our A/B tests add up to 97% improvement in Card Conversion Rate and 1.4% increase in overall App Conversion Rate compared to popularity-based baselines. Notably, our offline accuracy metrics strongly correlate with online performance, enabling reliable impact prediction before deployment. To our knowledge, this is the first work to detail large-scale recommendation of curated food collections in a dynamic commercial environment.

I. S. W. B. Prasetya, Samira Shirzadehhajimahmood, Saba Gholizadeh Ansari et al.

This short paper presents an architectural overview of an agent-based framework called iv4XR for automated testing that is currently under development by an H2020 project with the same name. The framework's intended main use case of is testing the family of Extended Reality (XR) based systems (e.g. 3D games, VR sytems, AR systems), though the approach can indeed be adapted to target other types of interactive systems. The framework is unique in that it is an agent-based system. Agents are inherently reactive, and therefore are arguably a natural match to deal with interactive systems. Moreover, it is also a natural vessel for mounting and combining different AI capabilities, e.g. reasoning, navigation, and learning.

Pedro Fernandes, Francisco C. Santos, Manuel Lopes

The rise of artificial intelligence (A.I.) based systems is already offering substantial benefits to the society as a whole. However, these systems may also enclose potential conflicts and unintended consequences. Notably, people will tend to adopt an A.I. system if it confers them an advantage, at which point non-adopters might push for a strong regulation if that advantage for adopters is at a cost for them. Here we propose an agent-based game-theoretical model for these conflicts, where agents may decide to resort to A.I. to use and acquire additional information on the payoffs of a stochastic game, striving to bring insights from simulation to what has been, hitherto, a mostly philosophical discussion. We frame our results under the current discussion on ethical A.I. and the conflict between individual and societal gains: the societal value alignment problem. We test the arising equilibria in the adoption of A.I. technology under different norms followed by artificial agents, their ensuing benefits, and the emergent levels of wealth inequality. We show that without any regulation, purely selfish A.I. systems will have the strongest advantage, even when a utilitarian A.I. provides significant benefits for the individual and the society. Nevertheless, we show that it is possible to develop A.I. systems following human conscious policies that, when introduced in society, lead to an equilibrium where the gains for the adopters are not at a cost for non-adopters, thus increasing the overall wealth of the population and lowering inequality. However, as shown, a self-organised adoption of such policies would require external regulation.