Yandi Li

Yandi Li, Haobo Gao, Yunxuan Gao et al.

Influence Maximization (IM) is a classical combinatorial optimization problem, which can be widely used in mobile networks, social computing, and recommendation systems. It aims at selecting a small number of users such that maximizing the influence spread across the online social network. Because of its potential commercial and academic value, there are a lot of researchers focusing on studying the IM problem from different perspectives. The main challenge comes from the NP-hardness of the IM problem and \#P-hardness of estimating the influence spread, thus traditional algorithms for overcoming them can be categorized into two classes: heuristic algorithms and approximation algorithms. However, there is no theoretical guarantee for heuristic algorithms, and the theoretical design is close to the limit. Therefore, it is almost impossible to further optimize and improve their performance. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, the technology based on Machine Learning (ML) has achieved remarkable achievements in many fields. In view of this, in recent years, a number of new methods have emerged to solve combinatorial optimization problems by using ML-based techniques. These methods have the advantages of fast solving speed and strong generalization ability to unknown graphs, which provide a brand-new direction for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Therefore, we abandon the traditional algorithms based on iterative search and review the recent development of ML-based methods, especially Deep Reinforcement Learning, to solve the IM problem and other variants in social networks. We focus on summarizing the relevant background knowledge, basic principles, common methods, and applied research. Finally, the challenges that need to be solved urgently in future IM research are pointed out.

Yandi Li, Jianxiong Guo, Yupeng Li et al.

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) models have attracted significant research attention due to their applicability and effectiveness in various real-world scenarios such as resource allocation, online advertising, and dynamic pricing. As an important branch, the adversarial MAB problems with delayed feedback have been proposed and studied by many researchers recently where a conceptual adversary strategically selects the reward distributions associated with each arm to challenge the learning algorithm and the agent experiences a delay between taking an action and receiving the corresponding reward feedback. However, the existing models restrict the feedback to be generated from only one user, which makes models inapplicable to the prevailing scenarios of multiple users (e.g. ad recommendation for a group of users). In this paper, we consider that the delayed feedback results are from multiple users and are unrestricted on internal distribution. In contrast, the feedback delay is arbitrary and unknown to the player in advance. Also, for different users in a round, the delays in feedback have no assumption of latent correlation. Thus, we formulate an adversarial MAB problem with multi-user delayed feedback and design a modified EXP3 algorithm MUD-EXP3, which makes a decision at each round by considering the importance-weighted estimator of the received feedback from different users. On the premise of known terminal round index $T$, the number of users $M$, the number of arms $N$, and upper bound of delay $d_{max}$, we prove a regret of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{TM^2\ln{N}(N\mathrm{e}+4d_{max})})$. Furthermore, for the more common case of unknown $T$, an adaptive algorithm AMUD-EXP3 is proposed with a sublinear regret with respect to $T$. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to indicate the correctness and effectiveness of our algorithms.