G-UBS: Towards Robust Understanding of Implicit Feedback via Group-Aware User Behavior Simulation
This addresses noisy implicit feedback for video recommendation systems, offering a novel method with strong gains but is incremental in leveraging existing techniques like LLMs and RL.
The paper tackles the problem of noisy implicit feedback in recommendation systems by proposing G-UBS, a group-aware user behavior simulation paradigm that uses LLMs and reinforcement learning to improve interpretation, resulting in a 4.0% higher play rate and 14.9% higher reasoning accuracy on a new benchmark.
User feedback is critical for refining recommendation systems, yet explicit feedback (e.g., likes or dislikes) remains scarce in practice. As a more feasible alternative, inferring user preferences from massive implicit feedback has shown great potential (e.g., a user quickly skipping a recommended video usually indicates disinterest). Unfortunately, implicit feedback is often noisy: a user might skip a video due to accidental clicks or other reasons, rather than disliking it. Such noise can easily misjudge user interests, thereby undermining recommendation performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Group-aware User Behavior Simulation (G-UBS) paradigm, which leverages contextual guidance from relevant user groups, enabling robust and in-depth interpretation of implicit feedback for individual users. Specifically, G-UBS operates via two key agents. First, the User Group Manager (UGM) effectively clusters users to generate group profiles utilizing a ``summarize-cluster-reflect" workflow based on LLMs. Second, the User Feedback Modeler (UFM) employs an innovative group-aware reinforcement learning approach, where each user is guided by the associated group profiles during the reinforcement learning process, allowing UFM to robustly and deeply examine the reasons behind implicit feedback. To assess our G-UBS paradigm, we have constructed a Video Recommendation benchmark with Implicit Feedback (IF-VR). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-modal benchmark for implicit feedback evaluation in video recommendation, encompassing 15k users, 25k videos, and 933k interaction records with implicit feedback. Extensive experiments on IF-VR demonstrate that G-UBS significantly outperforms mainstream LLMs and MLLMs, with a 4.0% higher proportion of videos achieving a play rate > 30% and 14.9% higher reasoning accuracy on IF-VR.